What About Bonds? An often overlooked, yet essential component of Your Investment Portfolio By Joyce Cassidy O’Reilly First, the ‘What’: Simply stated, a bond is a promise to repay the principal mount loaned to the issuer, along with interest (coupons) on a specified date (the maturity). Stocks and bonds are both securities. Unlike with equities, […]

My mortgage balance is WHAT!? From the desk of Charlie Craig: I was recently working with a client that had purchased a small shopping center listing of mine nine years ago. My client financed the acquisition through a conduit and the 10-year term of the loan was expiring in a year. I ran financing projections […]

Local impact of the Capital Purchase Program Updated: June 1, 2009 The map at FinancialStability.gov ( http://www.financialstability.gov/impact/index.html ) represents locations where the Department of the Treasury has funded transactions through the Capital Purchase Program, and will be updated as new transactions are announced. As of May 2009, Treasury has made investments in banks in 48 states, […]

Unclaimed Property consists of money and other personal assets that are considered lost or abandoned when an owner cannot be located after a specified period of time. It includes checking accounts, certificates of deposit, over payments, gift certificates, paid-up life insurance policies, unpaid wages, commissions, uncashed checks, death benefits, dividends, insurance payments, money orders, refunds, […]

Q-and-A: Researching financial institutions and advisers By: Jonathan D. Pond | Source: AARP.org Q: One of our local banks is getting some bad press, and I have a savings account with them. How do you know if a bank is still in good standing? -Jean, Washington A: Bank failure is a rarity, even during these […]

KANSAS CITY, Kan. (AP) – Three companies have agreed to pay $3.65 million in penalties for a pair of ammonia pipeline spills that killed fish in Kansas and Nebraska. The U.S. Justice Department and the Environmental Protection Agency filed the consent decree Friday in Kansas City, Kan. They allege that the pipelines’ owner, Magellan Ammonia […]

SAN JOSE, Calif. (AP) – Twitter’s been having a rough couple of weeks. A researcher looking into the attacks that knocked Twitter offline last week discovered another, unrelated security problem. At least one criminal was using a Twitter account to control a network of a couple hundred infected personal computers, mostly in Brazil. Networks of […]

CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas (AP) – A Texas man convicted of instigating fights among developmentally disabled residents at a state-run center has been sentenced to three years in prison. A Nueces County jury on Friday spared Jesse Salazar the maximum punishment for his role in what police called a “fight club” at the Corpus Christi State […]

MIAMI (AP) – Hurricane Guillermo has strengthened into a Category 2 storm far out in the Pacific. The National Hurricane Center says Guillermo’s maximum sustained winds are near 100 mph. Winds are expected to stay about the same for the next 12 hours, but the hurricane is expected to weaken Saturday as it moves over […]

BRISTOL, R.I. (AP) – A Rhode Island lobsterman who hauled up a 12½-pound crustacean says he’s having trouble finding a home for the creature. Bob Morris of Bristol says it would be a shame if the female lobster he estimates is about 60 years old ends up on the dinner table. He says he’d rather […]