TO CONTINUE READING THIS ARTICLE, CLICK THIS LINK FOR THE SF GATE & INVESTOPEDIA:  6 Things Youre Doing To Delay Your Retirement.

Avoid expensive mishaps by being in the know, particularly when it comes to your credit score, home loan and rainy day fund:

Ignoring Your Credit Score

Your credit score has never been as important as it is now. It’s not just about qualifying for the best interest rates and terms on credit cards, auto loans, private student loans and home loans anymore. It’s about qualifying at all.

For example, just a couple months ago, you needed a 580 credit score to qualify for home financing. Now, your score needs to be north of 620. And that’s just to get your foot in the door. To qualify for the best mortgage interest rates and terms, you’ll need a 720, according to Bob Walters, chief economist for Quicken Loans.

Another common money misstep is credit score procrastination. If you wait until you need to borrow money to get up to speed on your credit, it may be too late. Making big improvements to your credit score can take many months depending on your situation.

Luckily, it’s never been easier to access your credit. With new sites like Quizzle.com, you can get your hands on your credit report and score for free, no strings attached. Plus, credit improvement tools are now available online to help you make improvements so you’re in a good spot should you need to apply for financing.

FOR CONTINUATION OF THIS ARTICLE CLICK THIS LINK FOR SHINE: 3 Major Money Mistakes that Can Cost You – Manage Your Life on Shine.

States passed fiscal 2010 general-fund budgets totaling $627.9 billion, 5.4% less than a year earlier, says a study released last month by the National Association of State Budget Officers and National Governors Association.

Despite cuts, shortfalls for the 2010 fiscal year, which in most states began July 1, are $14.8 billion, the study says. The gap in 2011: $21.9 billion.

The liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities says new gaps have opened up in at least 39 states’ budgets for the current fiscal year. In all, every state except Montana and North Dakota addressed or still faces budget shortfalls for fiscal year 2010. “Very large” shortfalls likely will last through 2012, says Nicholas Johnson, an author of that study.

“One of the big challenges for (this) year is that states have done most of the easy things,” he says. Another problem: Federal stimulus funds, which helped fill gaps, will soon begin to expire.

FOR CONTINUATION OF THIS ARTICLE, CLICK THIS LINK FOR USA TODAY: States braced to tighten 2010 belts amid $14.8B in shortfalls – USATODAY.com.

David Laibson, a Harvard University economics professor, has one for you—one that many of us may wish we’d made last year.

“Promise that you’ll never try to time the market again,” he suggests, a not-too-subtle gibe at the many investors who sold their stock in the depths of the downturn early this year and then missed the huge rally that followed.

That’s not the only thing many of us could afford to improve. We would also like to save more, earn more and spend more wisely in 2010. But despite the fresh promise of a new year and a new decade, tackling all our goals at once can be overwhelming.

So to help you accomplish your many New Year’s ambitions, here’s a year’s worth of personal-finance aspirations, timed to major holidays to raise your chances of success:

• New Year’s Day: Save more.

“Saving more” is the top goal on people’s resolution list this year, according to a recent survey commissioned by Putnam Investments, which found that respondents put thriftiness ahead of those two perennials “losing weight” and “exercising more.”

But while dieting and exercise require discipline, effort and sweat, savings can easily be put on autopilot. Between bowl games and parties this weekend, take a few minutes to set up an automatic deduction from either your paycheck or your checking account to an online or a bank savings account. Or increase your contribution to your 401(k) by one percentage point. If the money isn’t in your paycheck or your checking account, chances are you won’t miss it.

In the same vein, commit at least half of any raise you receive this year to savings as well. That should be even easier to do, since you haven’t had that money in the first place.

FOR CONTINUATION OF THIS ARTICLE, CLICK THIS LINK FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL: How to Fix Your Finances in 2010 – WSJ.com.

The filmmaker at the table reminded the others of the story told in the classic film It’s A Wonderful Life — a tale about a small banker, played by Jimmy Stewart, who almost gets crushed by a big banker. In the end, though, the community rallies around the small bank and helps save it.

Three days later, the filmmaker made a short video, displayed on this site. The editor wrote a commentary about the idea. And others started pulling various resources together.

This site was set up as a modest home for the effort. A seed. But the idea will only have an impact if others take it from here.

How? For starters, you could move your money to a small bank. To do so, click on the button that says Find A Bank. But there are dozens of other possibilities: You can get your friends or organizations to do the same. You can use your online social networks to help broadcast the idea. You can look into where your town government keeps its money and, if it uses a big bank, you could try to get it to use a smaller bank. Start your own website (to improve upon or replace this one), dive into the research about smaller banks, and help give rise to a bigger, broader effort.

There is no official organization here. It’s a volunteer project. If you have ideas about how this idea can grow, send us a note and we’ll display the best ideas in the Updates section of the site.

We hope this idea will spread in a thousand different ways.

Thanks for whatever you can do.

FOR MORE INFORMATION, CLICK THIS LINK FOR THE WEBSITE: Move Your Money » Story.

In less than a year, Wall Street was back. The five largest remaining banks are today larger, their executives and traders richer, their strategies of placing large bets with other people’s money no less bold than before the meltdown. The possibility of new regulations emanating from Congress has barely inhibited the Street’s exuberance.

But if Wall Street is back on top, the everyday lives of large numbers of Americans continue to be subject to overwhelming trauma, chaos and disruption.

It is commonplace among policymakers to fervently and sincerely believe that Wall Street’s financial health is not only a precondition for a prosperous real economy but that when the former thrives, the latter will necessarily follow. Few fictions of modern economic life are more assiduously defended than the central importance of the Street to the well-being of the rest of us, as has been proved in 2009.

FOR CONTINUATION OF THIS ARTICLE, CLICK THIS LINK FOR THE HUFFINGTON POST: Robert Reich: 2009: The Year Wall Street Bounced Back and Main Street Got Shafted.

Sales are down sharply in recent months at nearly every major retail chain catering to teenagers, and interviews with teenagers suggest that the reasons go beyond their own difficulty finding part-time jobs.

“I think my sister and I, throughout this year we’ve kind of lost an interest in getting gifts and things like that,” said Morgan Porpora, 16, who in the past had a list of things she wanted for Christmas. “I guess we’ve noticed the economy and we just kind of even feel bad I guess asking for a lot.”

Last month, stores that specialize in clothing and accessories for teenagers were the worst-performing sector in all of retailing, posting a 7.8 percent year-over-year sales decline, according to Thomson Reuters.

Sales at stores open at least a year, a measure of retail health known as same-store sales, tumbled by double digits in November at Abercrombie & Fitch, Hot Topic and American Apparel. Same-store sales also declined at Zumiez, Wet Seal and American Eagle Outfitters.

Teenagers’ growing mindfulness about money is influenced, of course, by the way their parents are cutting back, and by a record-high teenage unemployment rate. But the biggest factor, according to the teenagers themselves, is that they have come to understand the social moment.

FOR CONTINUATION OF THIS ARTICLE, CLICK THIS LINK FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES: Recession? Teenagers Get It, and Are Cutting Back – NYTimes.com.

Investors pulled a net $490 billion from money funds this year through October, according to the Investment Company Institute, the funds’ trade group. A record-shattering $313 billion went to bond funds. And $1.9 billion fled stock funds.

“More money is flowing out of money funds than is going into bond funds — something that’s only happened twice in 26 years,” says Vincent Deluard, strategist at TrimTabs.com, which tracks fund flows. “It shows how deep the recession is: They may be taking money out to pay the bills or the mortgage.”

Normally, investors chase after stocks during periods of red-hot returns, and this year has produced rip-snorting returns for many stock funds. The average stock fund has soared 27.4% this year, according to Lipper, which tracks the funds. And 36 funds have soared 100% or more in 2009, led by the tiny Oceanstone fund, up 260%.

But investors aren’t chasing hot returns. And since the end of October, money fund assets have fallen an estimated $176 billion, the ICI says. An estimated $9.4 billion has fled stock funds. And $50 billion has poured into bond funds.

Some investors are probably leaving money funds because yields are tiny: The average money fund yields just 0.03%, according to iMoneyNet, which tracks the funds. Many yield zero.

Money fund yields are low because the Federal Reserve has been holding short-term rates down to boost the economy. The funds invest in short-term, high-quality IOUs.

FOR CONTINUATION OF THIS ARTICLE, CLICK THIS LINK FOR USA TODAY: Investors cash out of money funds in droves – USATODAY.com.

In nearly 200 years of recorded stock-market history, no calendar decade has seen such a dismal performance as the 2000s.

Investors would have been better off investing in pretty much anything else, from bonds to gold or even just stuffing money under a mattress. Since the end of 1999, stocks traded on the New York Stock Exchange have lost an average of 0.5% a year thanks to the twin bear markets this decade.

The period has provided a lesson for ordinary Americans who used stocks as their primary way of saving for retirement.

Many investors were lured to the stock market by the bull market that began in the early 1980s and gained force through the 1990s. But coming out of the 1990s, the best calendar decade in history with a 17.6% average annual gain, stocks simply had gotten too expensive. Companies also pared dividends, cutting into investor returns. And in a time of financial panic like 2008, stocks were a terrible place to invest.

With two weeks to go in 2009, the declines since the end of 1999 make the last 10 years the worst calendar decade for stocks going back to the 1820s, when reliable stock market records begin, according to data compiled by Yale University finance professor William Goetzmann. He estimates it would take a 3.6% rise between now and year end for the decade to come in better than the 0.2% decline suffered by stocks during the Depression years of the 1930s.

The past decade also well underperformed other decades with major financial panics, such as in 1907 and 1893.

“The last 10 years have been a nightmare, really poor,” for U.S. stocks, said Michele Gambera, chief economist at Ibbotson Associates.

FOR CONTINUATION OF THIS ARTICLE, CLICK THIS LINK FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL: For Stocks, the Worst Decade Ever – WSJ.com.

After urging bank executives at a White House meeting to provide more loans to potential employers, Obama said, “I’m getting too many letters from small businesses who explain that they are credit worthy,” but cannot get help from their local lenders.

FOR CONTINUATION OF THIS STORY, CLICK THIS LINK TO USA TODAY: Obama wants banks to make ‘extraordinary commitment’ to help economy – The Oval: Tracking the Obama presidency.