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Recently my husband and I bought new iPhone 4 phones (we love them by the way!) and opted to sell our old iPhone 3G on Ebay since there appeared to be a good market for them. We have sold things on Ebay before so we were not overly concerned with the process. The listings were approximately two weeks apart and in both listings we offered free shipping. The sales went through and we packaged and shipped our old phones off to their new owners.

A week to ten days after the first phone was mailed we received an email from the buyer asking for delivery confirmation of the package. Fortunately we paid for insurance and delivery confirmation so we had the information to send to the buyer. The confirmation showed that the phone was delivered 4 days after we mailed it. We never heard anything more from the buyer so we just thought it might have been a miscommunication at the delivery location. However, a few weeks later the same exact thing happened with the second phone we sold to a different buyer. Thankfully we also had insurance and delivery confirmation on this phone as well.

The lesson in our experience is when you are selling an item of value, be sure to protect yourself and opt for insurance and delivery confirmation. Otherwise you can open yourself up to potentially losing your item because there is no proof that you sent the item or that the buyer did or did not receive it in good condition.

Children are easy target for so many crimes and that includes identity theft. However, with identity theft, because children do not have jobs or a reason to monitor their credit, it could be many years later before you or your child discover the theft. In that amount of time, the thief can damage your child’s credit and employment history as well as develop a criminal record in your child’s name.

I will admit that my husband and I are both a bit paranoid about identity theft for ourselves – to the point that we maintain a permanent freeze on our credit reports and we check our reports often. But how would a parent know if their child’s identity was in jeopardy or how would a grandparent know if a delinquent parent was using their grandchild’s identity? According to the TransUnion website, one of the three credit reporting companies, you should be suspicious of identity theft for your child if one of the following happens:
• Your child begins to receive suspicious mail, like pre-approved credit cards and other financial offers normally sent to adults, in his/her own name.
• You try to open a financial account for him/her but find one already exists, or the application is denied because of a poor credit history.
• A credit report already exists in his/her name. If the child has one, he/she probably has been targeted already, since only an application for credit starts a report.
To learn more about how to investigate if you suspect that your child’s identity has been stolen, check out this page on the TransUnion website :
https://www.transunion.com/corporate/personal/fraudIdentityTheft/fraudPrevention/childIdTheft.page

Meanwhile, I would advise keeping your child’s social security number secure because that is where identity theft begins.

I caught an article today about bad habits people have that sabotage your retirement planning and I thought the final point about funding your retirement before you fund your child’s education was especially important. As the article states, “your child can borrow his way through college, but you cannot borrow your way through retirement.”

This is such an excellent point. As a parent I find myself consistently putting my children before myself in so many ways. Of course I want to give them the gift of a college education but we make it a rule of thumb to pay ourselves (and our retirement) first and according to our financial plan. If there are times when we need to adjust our savings, the adjustments are made to the educational savings plans before our retirement plans.

To read the other ways you might be sabotaging your retirement savings, check out this article:
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/5-Bad-Habits-Sabotaging-Your-usnews-1034336641.html?x=0

Many of us shop on the internet but do we always make sure that it is a secure site? Recently my sister had her credit card information stolen because she was not on a secure site. Within a matter of one day, six charges were made on her card and more were pending by the time she closed the account on the next business day.

Any time you are on a website where you are expected to provide secure information – - credit card information, account numbers or passwords, or anything else that someone could use to take your identity – - you should ALWAYS make sure you are on a secure website. To protect yourself, look for the following items when shopping online:

1- A SECURE CONNECTION – Normal web pages start with “http” however, over a secure connection, a website will begin with “https”. Note the “s” at the end.

2- A “LOCK” ICON- It is a standard practice for all web browsers to have a lock icon displayed when you are on a secure connection. I use Internet Explorer so my icon shows up in the far right of the web address bar. If you click on this icon it will display the details of the security of the site. If you are dealing with a merchant that you are not familiar with, you should click on this icon to view the site security because some fraudulent sites may try to imitate the icon. If you log into a PayPal account you can see that it says it is “identified by VeriSign.”

3- VERIFICATION SEAL – Online merchants want their customers to feel safe shopping with them so many will display highly visible but difficult to duplicate verification icons that will display details about the site’s security. With the PayPal example, an icon that says “VeriSign Identity Protection” is displayed.

If you don’t see any or all of these items, pick up the phone and call the merchant before risking your account and private information.

I always think it is important to teach my children the value of a dollar and we had an interesting lesson this past weekend. It all started when my husband and my young son started looking at Star Wars items on the internet. That led to them going on Ebay and my son deciding that he simply HAD TO HAVE the custom painted Star Wars Lego mini-figure. There was a little over an hour left in the auction and the current bid was at $12.50 with free shipping. The next thing I know, my son was dumping the money out of his piggy bank and was ready to hand it over to somebody… Anybody so that he could get the Lego. Clearly he did not understand Ebay.

I had to explain the entire auctioning process, the payment through Paypal, and the shipping concepts to him. Within this I asked him how much the figure was worth to him and then I made clear that he might not win the auction. I did not agree with how much he wanted to spend but since he was using his allowance, I agreed to help him. I think one of the biggest mistakes people can make on Ebay is that they get caught up in the auctioning process so I wanted to teach him about not spending more than he thought the figure was worth. To do this, I waited until the last 30 seconds to enter in his maximum bid. As it turns out, he didn’t win it but he already had another one in his sights and using a similar process of bidding at the last minute, he won without paying more than he (or we) wanted to spend.

Although I still think my son spent more on the Lego than I personally thought it was worth, he is very happy and is looking forward to it showing up in the mail this week. Meanwhile, it did turn out to be a good opportunity for us to explain the process to him and to show him a good way to weigh the value of the item against the money in his piggy bank.

And for now, both he and his father are BANNED from Ebay!

Mortgage rates, however, are at a 50 year low so many people are successfully reducing their household expenses by refinancing their loans. Just yesterday I read an article that indicated as many as 79% of the new loan applications in June were for refinancing. If you are considering refinancing your property, ask yourself the following questions to see if it might make sense for you too:

1. THE RATE – - Will refinancing provide you a significantly lower rate? Anything at or above 1% difference from your current rate is significant.

2. THE FEES – - How high are the closing costs and fees? Be sure to check for hidden fees or state/ local costs (attorney fees) that may not be indicated on national websites. How many months will you need of the lower rate to off-set the closing costs and fees?

3. THE DURATION – - How long do you realistically think you will continue to own the property and how does this compare to the number of months you need to off-set the cost of refinancing?

4. THE PRODUCT – - As you think about how long you expect to own the property, you may also want to consider your alternatives when you select which loan fits your needs. Adjustable rate loans have even lower rates but they carry a risk if end up staying in the property long enough for the rates to start adjusting.

Last Friday afternoon we loaded up the car and headed towards the Grandparents house in the North Carolina mountains for the Fourth of July weekend. We were just about 40 miles north of Athens when we made a right turn on I-85 North and then we hit it. A parking lot! It seemed like anyone and everyone was heading somewhere for the long weekend. I think we were averaging about 4 mph.

We began searching our GPS and maps for an alternative route and called the Grandparents. They said that the national news was reporting that people were traveling in record numbers. It seems as though many fiscally responsible Americans have been cutting back on their expenses and skipping or scaling back their vacations over the last few months and years but that trend may be easing up now. And companies are making it easier for us to fulfill our yearning vacation dreams by offering unheard of discounts. Just this morning I received notice of an airline sale for travel through November. This is a very rare move for the airlines since the summer is typically a busy season for air travel but to me it just shows how companies are willing to offer great discounts to get our travel business. Hopefully we can all take advantage of it!

Once again we are into the summer season and gas prices are up. Just this week I drove my kids to Hilton Head Island for a quick two days at the beach. The drive is just under 5 hours for us but along the way I was astonished at the different fuel prices I saw. Fortunately my car gets decent fuel economy so I was never really strapped to where I had to fill up. I did observe however that the prices were higher in the resort locations (of course Hilton Head) or places where people would possibly be stuck paying the asking price because there was no other option (right along the freeway or in towns so small that there were few options).

Fortunately for consumers, there are some options that make it easy to find the cheapest gas prices in your area. I tend to use http://autos.msn.com/everyday/GasStationsBeta.aspx or you can go to www.fueleconomy.gov to find several sites. I even found an application for my iPhone and it appears as though there are applications for Android phones as well. Applications like these provide consumers the ability to instantaneously compare prices and select the best station. It doesn’t get much better than that!

If you have a financial plan one of the biggest mistakes you can make is to not monitor the plan. At a minimum you should meet with your financial planner annually and assess if any of the following changes have occurred:

* FAMILY – birth, death, adoption, divorce, marriage, additional dependents (elderly parents or minor children), or minors no longer being classified as a dependent

* CAREER – increase or decrease in salary or job related expenses, benefit changes

* LIFESTYLE – drastic changes in spending habits or income

* FINANCIAL – purchase, sale, or inheritance of assets

* ECONOMIC – external factors such as swings in the markets, inflation/ deflation, tax law changes, etc. that influence asset value or income

Any of the above changes can affect your goals and/or have had an impact on your planned progress towards meeting your goals.

Often times our clients are surprised to learn just how much they are worth. Calculating your net worth is very easy to do but it just isn’t something that we tend to do on a regular basis so it is easy for it to change and us not be aware of the impact of such changes.

The basic formula to calculate your net worth is:
{ TOTAL ASSETS – TOTAL LIABILITIES = NET WORTH }

For most people their largest asset is usually their home but your total assets also includes cars, boats, furnishings, personal possessions, other real estate interests, financial accounts including retirement and investment accounts, and any interest you may have in a business. Because financial account values and real estate values are volatile right now people assume that the contribution to overall net worth is not significant but that is often not the case. People also just underestimate the total value of their other assets.

For most people their largest liability is their home mortgage but other liabilities include any outstanding balances or financial obligations that you may have such as a loan, family commitments (alimony or child support), or debt or guarantee related to a business. Just as people underestimate their value of their assets, they often underestimate how their liabilities have decreased over time.