34. 401k with paltry match or SPY ETF?
I think you understood much of what I say, in general. Unfortunately, I didn't follow Patches math.  What I gleen from your summary is a 1% match to the 10% invested, but a .8% expense. The ETF VOO has a .05% annual fee, a bit better than SPY.  A quick few calculations show that the 10% bonus does offset a long run of the .75% excess expense compared to external investing. After decades, the 401(k) appears to still be a bit ahead. Not the dramatic delta suggested in the prior answer, but enough to stay with the 401(k) in this situation. The tiny match still makes the difference. Edit - the question you linked to. The 401(k) had no match, and an awful 1.2% annual expense. This combination is deadly for the younger investor. Always an exception to offer - a 25% marginal rate earner close to retiring at 15%. The 401(k) deposit saves him 25, but can soon be withdrawn at 15, it's worth a a few years of that fee to make this happen. For the young person who is planning a quick exit from the company, same deal.

35. What can I replace Microsoft Money with, now that MS has abandoned it?
hledger is a free software, cross-platform double-entry accounting tool I've been working on for a while. It has command-line and web-based interfaces to your local data, and some other interesting features. There's also ledger (http://wiki.github.com/jwiegley/ledger/) which is command-line only. These are.. different, but worth a look for some folks.

36. Why don't banks print their own paper money / bank notes?
Any person at any time may produce their own currency, one can even do so on the back of a paper napkin, ripped beer coaster or whatever.  This is NOT a banking privilege, it is within the lawful ability of anyone capable of engaging in commerce. It is called a 'negotiable instrument' ... it gives the holder rights to a sum of money.  Notice that I say 'holder' ... this is what distinguishes it from a non-negotiable instrument, the fact that you don't need to redeem it from source, you can pass it to another who then becomes the 'holder in due course' and thus obtains the rights conferred. The conferable rights over a sum of money (or, indeed, other asset) are themselves 'value' Do banks do this ?  Yes, all the time! ... one of the simplest examples are cheques drawn against the bank, which are considered 'as good as cash'.  Usually they will be drawn out to the order of the person you wish to pay ... but can equally be drawn out to bearer.  The only reasons they resist making out to bearer is : But you can write your own at 'any time' on 'any thing' ... See the apocryphal, yet deliciously entertaining, tale of the 'negotiable cow'

37. Pros & cons in Hungary of investing retirement savings exclusively in silver? What better alternatives, given my concerns?
This sound like a very bad idea. If you invest exclusively in silver, your investment is not diversified in any way. This is what I would call risky. Have a look at index funds and ETFs and build a diversified portfolio. It does not take much time, and you don't need to let it do by someone else. They are risky too, but I see "silver only" as much riskier. You reduce the risk by holding on to the funds for a long time.

38. Is there any circumstance in which it is necessary to mark extra payments on a loan as going to “principal and not interest”?
It could be a couple of things besides extra principal: I seem to remember hearing that some (shady?) lenders would just pocket extra payments if you didn't specify where they were headed, but I've also been told that this just isn't true.

39. Automatic investments for cheap
For your purposes, I would recommend using direct investment in a no-load mutual fund.  I mostly use Vanguard and would recommend them.  They just about invented index funds, usually have the lowest (internal) expenses for index and many other funds, if you take electronic instead of paper statements there is no maintenance fee, have no transaction commission, can do periodic automatic investment from a bank account etc.  A typical index fund there would require an initial $3000 investment and would have a minimum of $100 for each additional investment.  If you can't come up with an initial sum of that size, you might be able to find a broker with a lower minimum and suitable free ETFs trades as others have suggested.

40. Do other countries have the equivalent of Australia's Negative Gearing?
In India, where I live, you can: In addition, housing loans are given priority status as well - bank capital requirements on housing loans is lower than for, say, a corporate loan or a loan against other kinds of collateral. That makes housing loans cheaper as well - you get a home loan at around 10% in India versus 15% against most other assets, and since you can deduct it against tax, the effective interest rate is even lower.  Housing in India is unaffordable too, if you're wondering. In a suburb 40 Km away from Delhi, a 2000 sq. foot apartment, about 1500 sq. ft. of carpet area, with no appliances costs about USD 250,000.

41. Is it possible to influence a company's actions by buying stock?
Another form of 'shareholder' activism. You might be able to buy a single share, which it seems would cost around $35, attend the AGM, and ask questions and/or shout or sing and delay proceedings. There would certainly be security guards or police ready to remove protesters at an AGM.

42. Why might it be advisable to keep student debt vs. paying it off quickly?
Like all other loan-vs-savings questions, it depends on the terms of the loan. If you have a choice, the usual answer is to pay off the loan with the worst terms (which usually means the highest interest rate) first, and only start with savings when you've paid off all the high-interest loans entirely. If your student loan is on US terms, then pay it off as soon as you can, unless you have commercial debt (credit-card or unsecured personal loan), which you should pay off first, or unless you have or are realistically likely to get eligibility for a forgiveness program. But it does depends on the terms of the debt, which in turn depend on the country you studied in; on UK terms it's a very bad idea to pay off a student loan any faster than you have to.  Interest is restricted to the rate of inflation, so good investments probably beat the interest rate of the student loan; the required repayments vary with your income, so savings are more useful than debt repayment if you encounter income difficulties (e.g unemployment) in the future, and finally the debt is automatically forgiven after 30 years, so you may never have to pay it all back anyway - so why pay it off voluntarily if it would get forgiven eventually anyway?

43. Should I sell my stocks when the stock hits a 52-week high in order to “Buy Low, Sell High”?
Though it seems unintuitive, you should rationally ignore the past performance of this stock (including the fact that it's at its 52-week high) and focus exclusively on factors that you believe should affect it moving forward.  If you think it's going to go up even further,  more than the return on your other options for where to put the money, keep the stock.  If you think it's peaked and will be going down, now's a good time to sell. To put it another way: if you didn't already have this stock, would you buy it today? Your choice is just about the same: you can choose between a sum of cash equal to the present market value of the shares, OR the shares.   Which do you think is worth more? You also mentioned that you only have 10 stocks in the portfolio.  Some are probably a larger percentage than others, and this distribution may be different than what you want in your portfolio.  It may be time to do some rebalancing, which could involve selling some shares where your position is too large (as a % of your portfolio) and using the proceeds toward one or more categories you're not as invested in as you would like to be.  This might be a good opportunity to increase the diversity in your portfolio. If part of your reward and motivation for trading is emotional, not purely financial, you could sell now, mark it as a "win," and move on to another opportunity.  Trading based on emotions is not likely to optimize your future balance, but not everybody is into trading or money for money's sake.  What's going to help you sleep better at night and help boost your quality of life?  If holding the stock will make you stress and regret a missed opportunity if it goes down, and selling it will make you feel happy and confident even if it still goes up more (e.g. you interpret that as further confirming that you made a good pick in the first place), you might decide that the risk of suboptimal financial returns (from emotion-based trading) is acceptable.  As CQM points out, you could also set a trailing sell order to activate only when the stock is a certain percentage or dollar amount below whatever it peaks at between the time you set the order and the time it fires/expires; the activation price will rise with the stock and hold as it falls.

44. Why would this kind of penny stock increase so much in value?
Disregarding the particular example and focusing on the actual questions: YES, definitely, the whole concept of "pump and dump scheme" refers to the many cases when this was intentionally done; Everything has a limit, but the limit can be quite high, especially if starting from a low value (a penny stock) and if the stock is low volume, then inflating ten or hundred times over a real value may be possible; and any value might be infinitely times overvalued for a company that turns out to have a value of zero. Yes, unless it's done very blatantly, you should expect that the "inflator" has much more experience in hiding the signs of inflation than the skill of average investor to notice them.

45. Price graphs: why not percent change?
The actual price is represented on charts and not the change in price as a percentage, because it is the actual price which is used in all other parts of analysis (both technical and fundamental), and it is the actual figure the security is bought and sold at. A change in price has to be relative to a previous price at a previous time, and we can easily work out the change in price over any given time period. I think what you are concerned about is how to compare a certain actual price change in low priced securities to the same actual price change in a higher priced securities.  For example: $1.00 rise in a $2.00 stock representing a 50% increase in price; $1.00 rise in a $10.00 stock representing a 10% increase in price. On a standard chart both of these look the same, as they both show a $1.00 increase in price. So what can we do to show the true representation of the percentage increase in price? It is actually quite simple. You view the chart using a log scale instead of a standard scale (most charting packages should have this option). What may look like a bubble on a standard scale chart, looks like a healthy uptrend on a log scale chart and represents a true picture of the percentage change in price. Example of Standard Price Scale VS LOG Price Scale on a Chart Standard Price Scale  On the standard scale the price seems to have very little movement from Mar09 to Jan12 and then the price seems to zoom up after Jan12 to Mar13. This is because a 4% increase (for example) of $0.50 is only $0.02, whilst a 4% increase of $7.00 $0.28, so the increases seem much bigger at the end of the chart. LOG Price Scale  On the LOG chart however, these price changes seem to be more evenly displayed no matter at what price level the price change has occurred at. This thus give a better representation of how fast or slow the price is rising or falling, or the size of the change in price.

46. How much money should I put on a house?
Before doing anything else: you want a lawyer involved right from the beginning, to make sure that something reasonable happens with the house if one of you dies or leaves. Seriously, you'll both be safer and happier if it's all explicit. How much you should put on the house is not the right question. Houses don't sell instantly, and while you can access some of their stored value by borrowing against them that too can take some time to arrange. You need to have enough operating capital for normal finances, plus an emergency reserve to cover unexpectedly being out of work or sudden medical expenses. There are suggestions for how much that should be in answers to other questions. After that, the question is whether you should really be buying a house at all. It isn't always a better option than renting and (again as discussed in answers to other questions) there are ongoing costs in time and upkeep and taxes and insurance. If you're just thinking about the financials, it may be better to continue to rent and to invest the savings in the market. The time to buy a house is when you have the money and a reliable income, plan not to move for at least five years, really want the advantages of more elbow room and the freedom to alter the place to suit your needs (which will absorb more money)...  As far as how much to put down vs. finance: you really want a down payment of at least 20%. Anything less than that, and the bank will insist you pay for mortgage insurance, which is a significant expense. Whether you want to pay more than that out of your savings depends on how low an interest rate you can get (this is a good time in that regard) versus how much return you are getting on your investments, combined with how long you want the mortgage to run and how large a mortgage payment you're comfortable committing to. If you've got a good investment plan in progress and can get a mortgage which charges a lower interest rate than your investments can reasonably be expected to pay you, putting less down and taking a larger mortgage is one of the safer forms of leveraged investing... IF you're comfortable with that. If the larger mortgage hanging over you is going to make you uncomfortable,  this might not be a good answer for you. It's a judgement call. I waited until i'd been in out of school about 25 years before I was ready to buy a house. Since i'd been careful with my money over that time,  I had enough in investments that I could have bought the house for cash. Or I could have gone the other way and financed 80% of it for maximum leverage. I decided that what I was comfortable with was financing 50%. You'll have to work thru the numbers and decide what you are comfortable with. But I say again, if buying shared property you need a lawyer involved. It may be absolutely the right thing to do ... but you want to make sure everything is fully spelled out... and you'll also want appropriate terms written into your wills. (Being married would carry some automatic assumptions about joint ownership and survivor rights... but even then it's safer to make it all explicit.) Edit: Yes, making a larger down payment may let you negotiate a lower interest rate on the loan. You'll have to find out what each bank is willing to offer you, or work with a mortgage broker who can explore those options for you.

47. Historical share price at exact day and time
An alternative to paying thousands of dollars for historical prices by the minute:  Subscribe to real time data for as low as USD$1.5/month from your broker, then browse the chart.

48. High credit utilization, some high interest - but credit score not overly bad. How to attack debt in this situation?
You need to pay off the entire balance of 7450 as soon as possible. This should be your primary financial goal at this point above anything else. A basic structure that you can follow is this: Is the £1500 balance with the 39.9% interest rate the obvious starting point here? Yes, that is fine. But all the cards and overdraft debts need to be treated with the same urgency! What are the prospects for improving my credit score in say the next 6-12 months enough to get a 0% balance transfer or loan for consolidation? This should not be a primary concern of yours if you want to move on with your financial life. Debt consolidation will not help you achieve the goals you have described (home ownership, financial stability). If you follow the advice here, by the time you get to the point of being eligible, you may not see enough savings in interest to make it worth the hassle. Focus on the hard stuff and pay off the balances. Is that realistic, or am I looking at a longer term struggle? You are looking at a significant struggle. If it was easy you would not be asking this question! The length of time will be determined by your choices: how aggressively you will cut your lifestyle, take on extra jobs, and place additional payments on your debt.  By being that extreme, you will actually start to see progress, which will be encouraging. If you go in half-committed, your progress will show as much and it will be demotivating. Much of your success will hinge on your mental and emotional toughness to push through the hard work of delaying pleasure and paying off these balances. That is just my personal experience, so you can take it or leave it. :) The credit score will take care of itself if you follow this method, so don't worry about it. Good Luck!

49. Why do credit cards require a minimum annual household income?
Here's one reason that's being overlooked in answers so far. (@ChrisInEdmonton, this is for your comment on @Chad's answer.) How do credit card companies make money? Sure, there's interest charges, but those are offset significantly by the cost of borrowing money, and by people defaulting on their debt / entering bankruptcy. The other way they make money is by processing transactions. They get a cut of whatever you buy. If you're a high-income person, and you're going to process a lot of expenditures with this credit card, your business is worth more. They will be willing to bribe you with things like cash-back, frequent flier miles, and insurance on your auto rentals, so that they can be your #1 go-to card.  (This works in concert with the way that some credit card vendors with richer clientele overall - American Express - get to charge higher merchant fees for access to these customers' wallets. But that was mentioned in other answers.) If you're not a high-income person, your business is worth less. If you go somewhere asking for credit, they're going to try and give you a card which will earn them the most money - which probably isn't the one where they give you back 50% of their transaction fee in rewards. It's a calculated risk, since they still have to compete against cash, debit cards, and all the other credit card companies, so they don't have you totally over a barrel, but you shouldn't expect as many freebies, either.
