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 I met with representatives of am institution that was considering investing in my new hedge fund on a recent visit to New York. After the meeting I got together with an old friend, whom I’ll refer to as “Harry”, for dinner. Stocks

Harry has a Sales Trader job, which is a person who handles the order for institutional clients such as hedge funds and mutual funds. He had an extremely successful career, and used to cover me, I was one of his accounts, in my “Ron Pollack Bulldog Days”. He retired or took a break from trading around the same time I did in 2004, but we continued to stay in touch with one another. Hedge Fund

Both Harry and I had varying, though generally little, success with business ventures after our time on Wall Street. After this, Harry began to miss the game and questioned me about returning to trading. Really, I miss it also. Back in early 2008, I told Harry that I was going to start managing money again, and he was thrilled and ready to jump back in himself. Brokerage Firm

I had to suspend the start of my new fund because of the market’s gyrations late last year. I saw Harry last fall and he looked stressed, which is unusual for a guy who can handle million share orders in volatile stocks like clockwork. Firms were disappearing all over the place, and my account, the one he had been counting on for his own return, was not there.

Soon after seeing Harry I met “Doug,” who runs a small brokerage firm that caters to hedge funds. I immediately thought of Harry and I put the two of them together. Doug gave Henry a trial opportunity, and Harry was very successful, so everything went well. After the first couple of phone calls to old accounts he got a huge order and it increased from there.

He’s only worked there for four months, but Harry is already one of the top producers in Doug’s company. Thus, it was no surprise to see Harry beaming when we met for dinner. Good money and having a blast,he’s making money. I was so pleased. Next, Harry offered to treat everyone for dinner. Actually, he exclaimed, “Ron Pollack I am going to treat you every time you come to NYC!I was already happy because we were eating at one of the great steakhouses in the City.

,“Every day we’ve been hearing stories of doom and gloom like the end of Wall Street, the end of hedge funds, the end of the world as we know it,toward the end of the evening, I asked Harry this question. While events have proven disorienting, I’d be interested in hearing your opinions, given the success that you have enjoyed.Ron, there are a lot of people hurting right now and I truly feel for them, but I am living proof that if you’re good at what you do, have the willingness to work hard and apply yourself and are realistic in your expectations, you can make it and even flourish in times like these,His answer was refreshing and went something like this, he said. I’m not getting paid what I used to but I have nothing to complain about. People like us are fighters, we’re survivors and there’s business to be done. If you are productive, someone will always be willing to do business with you.”

Harry, here’s to you my friend! Keep showing us how it’s done. signing off for now.

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When will cover end under this mortgage payment protection policy?
All cover under this mortgage payment protection insurance policy and all benefit payments will cease at the End Date of the policy. The End Date is fully explained in Section 10 of the policy document.Most of our policies carry payment protection insurance. And remember, it’s our job to reduce risk. That’s why we only offer realistic and affordable repayment schemes.PMI or Private Mortgage Insurance is normally required when you buy a house with less than a 20% down payment.

What happens if I stop paying the monthly premiums?
Your policy will lapse, meaning you are no longer insured. The length of time between the last payment and when the policy lapses, will vary between life insurance companies. The life insurance company will write to you to tell you that a payment, or several payments, have been missed and that your policy will lapse. The insurance company will always give you time to correct a missed payment.You can claim for incapacity under this mortgage payment protection insurance in the circumstances detailed in Section 5 of the policy document.PMI or Private Mortgage Insurance is normally required when you buy a house with less than a 20% down payment.

What is private mortgage insurance?
Mortgage insurance is a type of guaranty that helps protect lenders against the costs of foreclosure. This insurance protection is provided by private mortgage insurance companies. It enables lenders to accept lower down payments than they would normally accept. In effect, mortgage insurance provides what the equity of a higher down payment would provide to cover a lender’s losses in the unfortunate event of foreclosure.California requires drivers to carry automobile liability insurance. If you have medical payment provisions in your own policy, your insurance company should pay your medical bills up to the limit of your protection, regardless of who is at fault. But they sometimes pay only what they think is “reasonable and necessary”. Ask us.

I would like to apply for Payment Protection Insurance, how can you help?
FLM Loans are currently in the process of putting together a range of insurance products for our lenders. This has taken a while because we are determined that when we do put the FLM name to a product it will offer real value to our customers.A) As per the Totalbids Terms and Conditions, all transactions must be dealt with by the buyer/seller involved. Totalbids Admin will not advise or mediate beyond what is written in the FAQ and Help pages nor will we respond to emails regarding transaction disputes.

What is this mortgage payment protection policy designed to do?
This mortgage payment protection insurance policy is designed to offer protection for your monthly mortgage payments and related expenses by providing claims benefits if you are unable to work due to unemployment or incapacity.Mortgage insurance protects the lender and investor, or owner of the loan, against loss if the borrower defaults in their repayment of the loan.

What are the most common causes of claim?
Income protection pays your salary up to the insured level of benefit if you are unable to work through accident or illness. Instead of paying just one regular bill for a limited time - as with payment protection insurance - or giving a one-off lump sum - as with critical illness - IP pays a monthly sum to cover all your living expenses for as long as you are unable to work, if necessary until your chosen retirement age.Our payment protection insurance offers a simple and effective way to protect your monthly mortgage payments in the event you are unable to work due to accident, sickness or unemployment.

Click here for more information… commercial loans

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undo credit card debt

Lower Your Interest Rates with a Good Credit Rating

Follow these simplesteps and avoid credit card debt

Building up your credit rating has many advantages ; credit seems to be used now in areas of our everyday life and can help with consolidation. Some excellent examples would be to determine car insurance rates and also for employment screening. Once you have completed the process of improving your credit rating you will enjoy the best interest rates on items such as cars, homes, debt and even credit

Challenge Negative Items in Credit Report

The most efficient way to begin to build up your credit is by challenging any negative items on your current report, and debt. A good credit rating is made up of both past credit history as well as future items on your report. The older a negative item on your report, the better. This means that you will have a high chance of having the item deleted when you do challenge it.
The fair credit reporting act is what makes cleaning up your credit possible. It requires that credit bureaus look into at your claims and prove that items that you challenge should remain on your report. If they cannot come up with proof, then they need to delete the negatives within thirty days of receiving your dispute in the mail.

Pay all Accounts on Time

You should also make sure that any credit accounts that you have are paid on time, a calculator can assist with this. A good percentage of the credit scoring formula looks at your timely payments on accounts that you have with your credit card company. Meaning any late payments more than thirty days late will take significant points away from your credit rating.
Building up your credit takes time but it is well worth the effort due to the credit you will be able to receive once you are done. I hope this article helps you improve your credit rating!

In addition to building your credit card rating you need to make sure that you do not create bad debt

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Want to save money on the things you buy? Then you need to be aware of the games that retailers play. Here are two of the most common.

Reference Price Advertising

“Was $119.  Now only $89!” You have seen ads like this, as well as similar signs in the stores. Regardless of whether the retailer ever expected to sell a single unit at the $119 price, you feel like you are getting a deal, and that is the point.

Some states have laws requiring that these are at least honest advertisements. This means the store must have the item for sale at the stated price for a certain amount of time before they can claim that it was the “normal” or “regular” price. Many comply by having it at that price for the absolute minimum time required. Often, they don’t actually expect to sell any at the “regular” price. It is solely there to make you feel good about the new price.

Another way some retailers use this tactic is by having many similar models of a product. For example, a furniture store might have several mattresses that are very similar. They then rotate which one is on sale, so there is always one that looks cheaper by comparison. If this appears to be the case, certainly don’t pay the regular price for the others.

Of course you can save money in this situation by buying one of the “sale” items. But what if you like one of the ones that is at the “regular” price. Since they never expect to sell these at that price anyhow, the store manager may give you a similar discount if you ask (or insist). Otherwise, you can wait until it is that model’s “turn” to be on sale.

Price Matching Scams

Many stores have found that it costs them nothing to guarantee the lowest price. They claim that they will match any competitor’s price, and that may be true. But then again, they will only match the price on the exact same item - and they may not carry the same models as other stores. Also, they are very aware that we rarely check the prices at other stores before buying - and almost never after buying.

Research shows that when a store advertises that it will match competitors advertised prices, we generally have the impression that they have lower prices than other stores. This impression is there even when they are one of the higher-priced stores around. Again, this is because we often just don’t check the prices at other places.

The few customers that actually compare prices and demand a reduction don’t cost the store much. Meanwhile, the store gets to sell for more than other stores to all the “average” consumers. By the way, a study done by the Consumer Literacy Consortium in 2002 found that buyers who spent 16 minutes comparing prices online save an average of $100 on a TV. Do a little comparison shopping if you want to save money

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What are insider secrets? Sometimes they are techniques that most people (except the “insiders”) don’t know, like how to subliminally persuade people. Other secrets can save you money once you know them, like the first one of the following five secrets.

Five Insider Secrets

1. Why has 3,000 miles become the standard for oil change frequency in cars? This is an insider secret that is hidden in plain view. It’s right there in your owners manual for your car. Auto makers recommend an oil change every 5,000 or 6,000 miles. Since most cars are under warranty through many oil changes, they wouldn’t recommend such an interval if they thought it wasn’t often enough.

Getting an oil change every three thousand miles is a marketing idea from the oil change industry. Of course you could reduce wear on the engine if you changed the oil every 3.000 miles or even every 100 miles, right? The problem with that is that the small extra savings on wear couldn’t compare to the cost of the changes. The appropriate balance for cheapest overall maintenance is the manufacturer’s recommendation. If you own your car for 100,000 miles this little secret can save you $500.

2. Sunflower oil is used, along with parsley, in at least one commercial bad breath treatment. Both of these  also both work individually, in their natural forms. Chewing on a sprig of parsley will freshen your breath immediately. Eating raw sunflower seeds will freshen your breath, and the oil absorbs odors that may emanate from your stomach as well. Roasted sunflower seeds tend to cause bad breath, by the way, so stick to the raw ones.

Try brushing your tongue too. One experiment showed that brushing just teeth reduced odor by 25%. Brushing the tongue reduced odor by 75%. Do both to reduce odor by 85%.

3. Why do real estate agents sometimes advertise their listings without prices? Is this a better way to sell the client’s house? Not at all. Many home buyers will skip right over the ads with no prices. There are enough to look at that don’t waste their time, because they do have the prices.

The reason agents do this is to get people to call out of curiosity. They know that most who call will not be interested or qualified to buy that particular home, but they can be sold something else. In other words, this is a prospecting tool for the agent! Demand that the price be put in the advertisements for your home, if you want the best chance to sell it.

4. Here is an insider’s secret from the beer industry. In numerous blind taste tests, researchers find that draft beer tastes better to most people than the bottled version of the same beers. The bottle in front of them as a matter of identity for consumers (”I’m a Bud man”), or makes them feel that they are not appearing to be too cheap. Unless telling the world your brand of beer is important to who you are, why not drink the better beer for less?

5. Good salesmen often use a subliminal persuasion technique called “mirroring and matching.” They match the pace of your speech, sit like you do, use your words, and even try to mirror your facial expressions. This is a highly effective technique for establishing rapport and trust. You just feel better about a person who seems a lot like you. You can try this technique yourself. At least remember this insider secret, to protect yourself the next time you buy a car or other expensive item.

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I learned a lesson about inexpensive car insurance when I was younger: Insurance agents lie. I would love to be able to say this is rare, but my experience tells me it is depressingly common. Apart from lying, they just won’t tell you some things you need to know to save money.

Car insurance was just a legal requirement as far as I was concerned. I didn’t have valuable cars when I was young, and I had no assets to protect from lawsuits. All I wanted was the minimum legal coverage needed to be on the road. I always made this very clear to my insurance agents, using many rephrasings, like “Just what the law requires, and nothing more,” just to be sure they understood.

I assumed that this minimum was what my insurance company was giving me. Only after paying the premiums for many years did I learn that they had lied. I didn’t have the most inexpensive car insurance policy, as they claimed. They gave me not the minimum coverage required by law, but their own “company minimum.” I was pissed off.

I went to other insurance companies and they tried to do the same thing, passing off their own normal liability policies as the state-mandated minimum requirements. Only when I pushed would they provide the policy that I wanted - as long as I signed more paperwork, acknowledging that I was “under-insured.” That was fine. I had no assets to protect at the time (Having few assets means you’re less of a target for a lawsuit).

The bottom line is that by commission and omission, you will likely be lied to by insurance agents. I overpaid by hundreds of dollars over those years, because of the lies. Now you know what to watch for if you just want a basic liability policy. Here are some other things you should know about getting inexpensive car insurance.

Secrets Of Inexpensive Car Insurance

- Get several quotes, of course. The important part here, though, is to be sure that each quote is for the same thing. Write down and compare the specific policy limits, deductibles and a other parts of the policies.

- Review your policies annually. Ask for a policy review and get new quotes every year or so. Suppose that speeding ticket you had is past the three year mark (or whatever the company guideline is). They will often “forget” to drop the rate, so you may need to remind them.

- Take the kids off your policy. If your kids are at a college that’s more than 100 miles away, you can have them taken off the insurance policy and save a lot of money. You can’t let them drive the car when they come home to visit though.

- Raise your deductible. You will always get more inexpensive car insurance with higher deductibles. Plan to pay the first $1,000 of that accident if it happens someday. In the meantime, you may save far more in premiums over those years.

- Drop collision coverage. Once the value of your car is below a certain amount (an amount you can afford to lose), drop the collision coverage. It doesn’t make sense to pay out thousands over a few years to insure a car that is worth just a few thousand.

- Ask about special discounts you might be eligible for. Non-smoker discounts, car/home policy discounts, and others are a possibility. Ask what discounts you may be eligible for in the future, too, and remind your agent when the time comes.

-Look at every part of the policy, and don’t pay for things you don’t need. Ask about anything you don’t fully understand. Asking a lot of questions and really understanding the policy is one of the surest ways to get cheap insurance.

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The subliminal persuasion technique of “mirroring and matching” is easy to understand. It is simply a way to make a person feel more comfortable and trusting of you. We all feel more comfortable with some people than others, and there are reasons for this that have nothing to do with the character of the people and everything to do with the specific ways that they operate.

I had just one neighbor most of the year when I used to live in a small cabin in Michigan. He was a big friendly guy, and for lack of any other people, we spent quite a bit of time standing out on the road by the beach talking. After a year of this, you might think we got along just fine, and we did, except that we irritated each other. We never said it, but it was obvious that our “styles” clashed.

He talked so slow that it drove me crazy! I am sure that when I rattled on at high-speed it annoyed him as well. We became friends despite this, but can you imagine if when I first met him I was trying to sell him something or persuade him to do something? I would have seemed like the classic fast-talking salesman. Most likely, any efforts at persuasion would have failed.

This is why step number one of the “mirroring and matching” technique of persuasion is to match the pace of your prospect’s speech. Talk at the same speed, and people will feel that you are more like them. They will trust you more.

You should also use their words. If they say “I can see how that works” several times, at some point say, “You can see how this works.” Pay attention. If they use the words “understand,” “hope,” or the expression “that makes sense,” more than once, use the same words or expressions to persuade them. This is the “matching” part of this persuasion technique.

The “mirroring” part is simply acting, moving and positioning yourself as they do. Be careful not to appear as though you are mimicking the person, but mirror them as much as you can. Sit in the same position, use the same facial expressions. Laugh when they laugh, and if you are really good at this, laugh the same way.

When done well, you can use this technique to establish rapport quickly and easily with most people. Most people will never notice that you’re doing this, but of course don’t be too obvious. When you become good at it, the person will just feel that you’re a lot like they are, that you can “relate” to them, and they can relate to and trust you. A bond will begin to develop between you.

You can test this bond by “leading.” When you think you have established the bond, change your body posture, to see if the person unconsciously does the same. Uncross your legs and see if the prospect does the same, or lean back to see if they follow your lead. If so, they are ready to follow and trust you.

At this point, you continue to mirror and match, but you also start to lead the prospect. You lead him right to the bottom line on the contract, or to whatever action you want him to take. Practice helps, of course, but done properly, this is one of the more powerful persuasion techniques.

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If you want to save money on that next purchase, it can help to know the pricing secrets of retailers. Here are a couple of those secrets.

The Minimum Advertised Price

Pricing may not make much sense at first look. Why, for example, does whole wheat pasta cost three times as much as regular pasta, when regular white-flour pasta requires the extra trouble and expense of taking parts of the wheat out? Of course, economist will tell you that price is determined by what the market will bear, and that is certainly an important principle to understand, but does it always apply in real life? Sort of.

Lets start with a look at the “manufacturers suggested retail price.” Sometimes also called the “list price,” what does this really represent. In theory, of course, it is the price that the manufacturer suggests to the retailer. In practice, it is generally the maximum price a retailer can charge. (Who really wants to buy something that is priced higher than the MSRP?)

There is another price that manufacturers suggest to retailers, though. It is the MAP, or “minimum advertised price.” This is not an absolute minimum that retailers can sell for (and they certainly want to sell for more if they can), but they risk upsetting suppliers if they sell for less than this. How can a manufacturer convince a retailer to carry a product if competing retailers are selling it so cheap that it is difficult to make a profit on it?

To determine (approximately) what the MAP is, you should check several stores for a product. If they are all advertising the product on sale for around the same price, it is probably close to the MAP. The big box stores often stick to the MAP in their sale advertisements. You can sometimes find sales that price the product below the manufacturers minimum advertised price at small stores. Smaller stores have less to risk by angering suppliers, so check the smaller stores to save money.

Be aware, though, that some stores will sell below the MAP because they are selling incomplete products. If it is a computer, for example, you might have to buy a keyboard and speakers separately. If others are selling a complete product, compare the total cost of everything you need to get a product that is functional at these “discount” stores.

Prices Ending In 99

We all know that $29.99 might as well be $30, so why do retailers use this ploy? There is a simple explanation: Because it works. Even if you automatically round up a price like this, you may not have looked at it in the first place if it said $30. This is because we process information from left to right, so you see the “2″ before anything else, and this is more appealing than a “3″.

Your mind is thinking “20-something dollars” versus “30-something dollars.” Even if your next thought is “Oh, it’s $30,” you are already looking at the product. That certainly makes you more likely to buy it than if you never stopped to look at it.

Also, retailers get caught in this game whether they like it or not. For example, once gasoline retailers started pricing a gallon using “.9″ cents, how could any of them stop? Imagine if all the other gas stations had gas at $2.99 and 9/10 and one had $3.00 on the sign. The difference on ten gallons would be a penny - not worth driving further. But us drivers just see that they are the most expensive.

What can you do with this knowledge? You might save money by always rounding up those prices and so being less tempted to buy - which you probably already do. Also be aware that the 9/10 caught your eye at the gas station, but a penny or a tenth of a penny savings won’t justify going out of your way. You’ll save more money just stopping at the first reasonable station.

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Smart investing isn’t just knowing what to do, but also means avoiding investment mistakes. The science of behavioral economics has identified many common mistakes that people make when investing. Here are two to watch out for.

Investment Mistake - Status Quo Bias

The “status quo bias” is our tendency to automatically value more highly the existing situation over the alternatives. For example, this shows up in stock investing in an investors unwillingness to sell what he owns and reinvest in better stocks. Of course it seems easier to leave things how they are, but there is more than this involved in this mistake.

An investor may be perfectly willing to spend the time to find investments for “new” money, for example, yet unwilling to spend an equal amount of time replacing an existing investment with a better one. There is an attachment to what we already own, and this attachment can cost us, whether in actual losses or in lost opportunities to make more money.

To overcome this tendency, you should always look at your investments with the question in mind, “If I was looking at this right now for the first time, would I invest in it?” If the answer is no, you should probably sell the investment and reinvest the proceeds in something else. After all, why should you leave your money in a stock you expect to go up 5%, when there are others that you expect to go up in value by 25%? Invest in those!

The exception to this, of course, is if the transaction costs are high (not usually a problem with stocks). If for example, you have a rental house worth $140,000, you can’t just take that $140,00 and invest it elsewhere, because might only clear $130,000 after the costs of selling. In that case, you need to ask if you’ll do better with that $140,000 house or another investment that costs $130,000.

Investment Mistake - The Endowment Effect

This mistake results from our tendency to over-value what is ours. In one experiment a group of people were asked to put a price on various objects, ranging from ashtrays to coffee makers and books. Individuals in the second group were each given one of the objects to hold onto for a while. Later they were asked to put a price on “their” object. These prices averaged much higher than those given by the first group. Even a temporary “ownership” was enough to inflate the perceived value.

How does this lead to investment mistakes? One way it does so is in a person’s tendency to hang onto an investment just because he owns it. Especially if you have done some research, and have developed a theory, it is difficult to let go of “your” investment. Once again, the solution to this is to look at each investment you own as though you didn’t yet own it. Does it really make sense?

Another good example of the endowment effect is seen all the time in real estate. You might love the new kitchen you put in a house, and really feel that it added $40,000 to the value of the house. Of course the market might value it at only $20,000. Think about it for a moment, and you might realize that you would never value someone else’s kitchen renovations at more than that.

This becomes a real issue when you try to sell investment properties. I have seen people price a property too high and sit on it for years - incurring expenses the whole time. In the end, they sometimes even sell for less than they could have gotten initially. This can be an expensive mistake. Investments are not worth what you feel they are worth. They are worth only what the market will pay. Try to think as an outsider would to avoid this investment mistake.

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Blaming financial trouble on outside factors is the norm, but is it the truth? Sometimes. Unexpected things do happen, after all. On the other hand, some people manage to handle the unexpected without any real financial difficulty, right? What are they doing differently?

To begin with, some people - even some with a low income - set aside money for the inevitable car repair or visit to the doctor. A car repair, a visit to the doctor, a washing machine breaking down - these are all unexpected at the time they happen. But on the other hand, it is totally predictable that they will happen at some point in your life, right? If you think or pretend that they won’t - and so don’t have money set aside for them - maybe there is something wrong with how you’re thinking.

Fortunately you can change how you think. You can choose to reflect on your past, for example, and note that every year you have had several “surprises” that cost hundreds of dollars. You can remember the financial trouble these caused, and the stress, and decide to be ready next time. Then you can set aside a little bit of money each week in expectation of these “unexpected” events. This doesn’t mean you worry about these things - just the opposite. You plan so you don’t have to worry.

Poor Thinking Habits Equal Financial Trouble

There are other ways in which poor thinking habits affect financial matters. For example, you probably know how much easier it is to buy things when you have a credit card. The research confirms this, by the way. It even shows that people will pay more when paying with credit. In one study, those who were allowed to use credit cards at an auction for Boston Celtics tickets bid twice as high as those who were required to pay cash (even though the latter were allowed two days to pay).

Obviously this tendency to be freer with credit can get you into trouble. A solution? Train yourself to think of all money as cash. Every time you are faced with a possible purchase using a check or credit card, ask yourself if you would do it if it was cash in your hands. If this is too difficult, get cash from your bank account before you go shopping, and leave the credit cards home.

Your mind works in certain habitual patterns. The idea then, is that rather than let it mislead you, you use these habits in your favor. Another way to do this is to procrastinate in making purchasing decisions. When we procrastinate about something, we often just don’t get it done. The same is true when putting off buying something. If it is important enough, you’ll still buy it later, but many things will be left unbought. Putting off buying decisions can radically reduce your expenditures.

Here’s another habit to program into your thinking: Think of prices in terms of hours worked. Suppose you see a new television you like, and it costs $1,800. Now, let’s assume you make about $12 per hour after all taxes. When looking at that television, do the math. It takes 150 hours of your labor to pay for it. Imagine going to work for an extra day each week for 19 weeks (8 hours per day) to pay for the television. Is that price too high now?

Include the costs of interest if you are buying on credit. You might pay $2,400 for that television before you are done. In that case the price is 200 hours of work (working Saturdays for half of the year, for example). In fact, consider the total cost with interest for all purchases and you might change your mind on many of them.

To review: Procrastinate when thinking about spending money, think of it all as cash, or better yet, think of it all as hours worked. See the total cost with interest if you are financing something. Expect the unexpected and plan for it. Think differently. Financial trouble starts in your mind, and that is where you need to fix them.