What Payout Options Do I Have?
Payout options in the realm of annuities tend to be guaranteed by the insurance company providing the annuity, and may come in many forms depending on the investor’s preference. Annuities can pay income to the annuitant in a few ways. One of the ways is to turn the entire balance of the annuity into a pension-like income stream for life, or jointly on two lives. The payout tends to be higher than the safe withdrawal rate than investors can use in an investment account, and it provide guarantees and surety where it wouldn’t exist otherwise. You can also elect to have these payments start off slightly lower, and then to increase at a guaranteed rate, to keep up with the cost of living. Continue reading...
What is a Self-Employed 401(k)?
Self-Employed 401(k)s are one of the best ways for self-employed people to save for retirement. Self-Employed 401(k)s function in exactly the same way traditional 401(k)s do, except for a few tweaks. First of all, Self-Employed 401(k)s can only be opened by a business owner or partnership with no employees, although your spouse may also contribute to the Self-Employed 401(k) if he or she works for the business. Continue reading...
Can I Take a Periodic Distribution From My Cash-Balance Plan?
Periodic distributions are one of the main ways that former employees enjoy the benefits of a Cash Balance plan. Yes, you can take periodic distributions from your cash-balance plan. As opposed to the other option (lump-sum distribution), opting for the periodic distribution can help you sleep better at night, knowing that you have a fixed stream of income for the rest of your life. This Life Annuity option is mandated by law to be an option to participants of a cash balance plan. Continue reading...
What is Dividend Recapitalization?
Leveraged Recapitalizations involve issuing new corporate bonds to finance a share buyback or large dividend, essentially rebalancing the capital structure of the business. Dividend recapitalizations will cause the share price to reduce, largely because the company’s debt-to-equity ratio has changed. This can be used to make the company look unattractive to potential acquirers. Recapitalizations are restructuring of a company’s capital. Dividend recapitalizations are sometimes called dividend recaps. Continue reading...
What is Income from Operations?
Income from operations will be the net income which is solely focused on revenue from operations minus the cost of operations. It excludes gains or losses from minority interest investments, or sale of assets. Income from Operations is also called Net Operating Income (NOI). In accounting terms it is arrived at by subtracting operating expense from gross profit, where gross profit is net sales minus cost of goods sold. Continue reading...
How Much Will Individual Health Coverage Cost?
There are many factors that determine how much you pay for health coverage, such as age, income level, and the type of plan you want. The least expensive plans will be for young people (age 30 or under) who just want catastrophic coverage – this type of coverage is high deductible and does not cover frequent visits to the doctor or even check-ups. It is designed to provide coverage only in the event of a major accident. Continue reading...
Why Use Bitcoin?
Do you like security, speed, and low to zero transaction costs when conducting financial transactions? Bitcoin aims to offer all three. Security, speed, and low transaction costs are among bitcoin’s objectives. In a peer-to-peer network, there are no middle-men charging fees for clearing transactions, operating a call center, or maintaining the security of a database. Some types of fraud are much less likely than in traditional systems since the existence of a balance and the validity of transactions are constantly checked and updated by thousands of distributed, independent nodes in the network that do not close based on traditional banking hours. Transactions clear almost immediately instead of waiting on a large market or a Federal bank to balance its books. Continue reading...
How does Bitcoin Mining Work?
Anyone with a computer connected to the internet can potentially be a bitcoin miner. Bitcoin’s blockchain technology requires that a large network of computers, running the same client software, be used to randomly succeed at validating blocks of encrypted transactions every 10 minutes or so. That’s where bitcoin mining comes in. Mining is the act of letting one’s computer run what’s known as the “hash function” over and over and over in an attempt to crack the codes on the blocks that need validation. The codes that need cracking are all similar and are only difficult enough to require an average of 10 minutes for a random mining computer to get the right answer. The code and the answers are only significant in that they take time to complete, and that they allow the transactions to be validated and added to the ledger of all bitcoin transactions. Continue reading...
What is a Stop Order?
A stop order is like putting a lure out on a pond but having a robot there to cut the line or reel in the lure if the conditions are not met, such as a fish too small to bother with, to stick with the metaphor, so that the fisher-person (investor) can take a nap or attend to the many other lines he may have in the water. A stop order names a price which serves as a trigger point, and once the security price has crossed this trigger point, a market order is entered to buy or sell at the next available price. It might be called a buy-stop or sell-stop depending on which action it pertains to. Continue reading...
What are Fibonacci Channels?
Price movement often occurs in a range-bound way, even when an uptrend or downtrend is in effect. Fibonacci channels estimate support and resistance numbers using Fibonacci numbers, which are found throughout the natural world, in order to define possible places where reversals will occur. Fibonacci numbers are related to the study of chaos theory, which seeks to find order in complex systems. Since the markets have so many variables, but no lack of data, they are an excellent place to search for Fibonacci patterns. Continue reading...