Money Making 2/10 Tools

By Dian Vujovich

Nothing like practical or cost-savings ideas to add some fat to your savings accounts.

Starting with addictions, quit smoking! If you’re a two-pack-a-dayer, at the end of this year you could be 4,380 bucks richer if those smokes are costing $6 a pack. At five dollars, you’d be ahead over $3600 and two packs, at four bucks each, smoked every day of the year will save you nearly $3000. That’s not chicken feed.

On-line trading will cost less per trade at Schwab beginning on Jan.19. That’s when the $8.95 commission per online trade for stock and non-Schwab exchange-traded funds goes into affect. That’s a big change from the $12.95 charges investors with less than $1 million in assets held at Schwab have been paying.

According to one source, “When we simplify our pricing, we often get rewarded with a greater share of assets, “said Benjamin Brigeman, Schwab’s executive vice president of investor services.

We’ll see.

It’s no secret that the stock market hasn’t been attracting customers. Schwab is hopeful this will lure more back. Their drop in price, however, isn’t the rock-bottom lowest around. Depending on the firm, commissions on trading stocks run pretty much from $6.99 to $19.95 depending upon the number of shares bought or sold and the amount of assets held in an account.

Finally, as you know I’m a big fan of Roth IRAs. Benefits like paying taxes now instead of later and no penalty for not taking withdrawals by a certain age are just two that make good financial sense to me. But there’s still an awful lot of confusion about Roth IRAs including questions about who can open an account, how to convert from an IRA to a Roth, who that conversion would be best for, etc. etc.

To help clear up some of the mystery, TD AMERITRADE has added some good tools and research to their site. One of them is a Roth Conversion Analyzer tool to help investors find out if converting to a Roth IRA is worth it.

This site is worth the visit: http://www.tdameritrade.com/planningretirement/ira/overview.html or http://tinyurl.com/yb6qtsy .

Back to that stop smoking idea. The max someone under the age of 50 can contribute to a ROTH IRA is $5000 a year. Since you’ve acquired that money thanks to not buying a couple of packs of cigs a day, if a 25-year old invested 5g’s each year for the next 40 years and that money had an average annual return of 8 percent, that lucky non-smoking lady would have over $1.4 million by age 65. Money she won’t owe the Uncle a penny of! Yahoo for her!!!

(Source:
http://www.newsobserver.com/business/consumer_retail/story/81287.html?storylink=mirelated or http://tinyurl.com/ykrdznw .)