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Savvy Senior: How to pick a financial advisor Savvy Senior How to Pick a Financial Advisor Dear Savvy Senior, Can you give me some tips on how to choose a good financial planner or advisor? My wife and I are five or six years away from retiring and could use some professional help to get us on track. * Seeking Advice Dear Seeking, With all the different financial advisers and services available today, choosing a trusted professional that can meet your needs can be a bit confusing. Here are some suggestions that can help.

Spain's economic crisis, the government's response to it, and pervasive corruption have inspired a flowering of the black market economy. FORTUNE -- Outside the front door of an IKEA in the Barcelona suburb of L'Hospitalet de Llobregat, a group of men -- mostly immigrants from Ecuador -- offer shoppers informal delivery services. In Spain's crisis economy, it's a competitive business -- to cut down on conflict, the drivers pick numbered balls to set a queue -- and with some negotiating, a shopper can get immediate delivery for less than what IKEA's official drivers charge.

With the unemployment rate slowly falling, many Americans are facing a healthier job market and trying to get their financial lives back on track. Based on findings of the FINRA Investor Education Foundation's National Financial Capability Study of more than 25,000 Americans, the FINRA Foundation has developed five tips to help you manage daily financial challenges and build a brighter financial future in 2014.

How the Government Botched Its Effort to Hold Wall Street Accountable After the Crisis The Department of Justice (DOJ) fell down on many of its efforts to hold Wall Street accountable for mortgage fraud after the crisis, according to a new audit from the U.S. Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General (OIG). The DOJ promised the public that it would place a priority on going after mortgage fraud. But the report finds that "DOJ did not uniformly ensure that mortgage fraud was prioritized at a level commensurate with its public statements." One telling example is that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) ranked mortgage fraud as the lowest threat in its lowest crime category. The OIG also visited FBI field offices in Baltimore, Los Angeles, Miami, and New York and found that either it was a low priority or not even listed as a priority. Meanwhile, the FBI got $196 million in funding to investigate mortgage fraud between 2009 and 2011, yet the number of agents doing the investigation decreased in the same time, as did the pending investigations. More related issue from Corliss: http://corlissonlinegroup.com/ http://corlissonlinegroup.com/blog/ http://corlissonlinefinancialmag.blogspot.co.uk/ http://www.pinterest.com/geraldhussen/corliss-online-financial-mag/

There are two types of shares, ordinary shares and preference shares. * Ordinary shares are the most familiar type of shares and have flexible dividends (dividends that are adjusted in relation to a company's profit). These shares also allow full voting rights. * Preferred shares carry fixed dividends, which must be paid before any dividends are paid to ordinary shareholders. However, preferred shares do not allow voting rights. Remember that when dealing with shares in the stock market as we know it, it will practically always be involving ordinary shares and this should not be a very big issue!

Ryanair has followed up its pledge to "not unnecessarily piss people off" by trimming some of its most excessive charges, this consists of baggage fees and penalties for not printing a boarding pass. The initial actual measures announced from the time when chief executive Michael O'Leary completed a Damascene change to better customer service will also comprise more tolerance of slight booking errors, less irritating announcements onboard and permitting passengers a second small piece of hand luggage with them on the plane. Ryanair said that, after extensive customer feedback on its website, it would introduce several improvements over the next six months.

Democratic presidents tend to preside over better economies than Republican ones, but that may be down to pure luck, according to a recent paper from Alan Blinder and Mark Watson at Princeton. Since the end of World War II, the U.S. economy has grown at an average real rate of 4.35% under Democratic presidents and only 2.54% under Republicans. So what gives? "Democrats would no doubt like to attribute the large D-R growth gap to better macroeconomic policies, but the data do not support such a claim," they write. "It seems we must look instead to several variables that are mostly 'good luck.'" Three factors can explain 46-62% of the growth gap, according to the paper. Here are the reasons (via James Hamilton): Oil shocks. With the exception of Jimmy Carter, oil price shocks tend to dog Republican administrations more. The 1956-57 Suez Crisis, early-70s OPEC embargo, 1980 Iran-Iraq War, and the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990 all happened during Republican administrations. Productivity. It's hard to say that a U.S. president is responsible here, but Democrats tend to see bigger gains in productivity. Bill Clinton, for example, enjoyed a big boost in U.S. productivity during the 1990s. Consumer confidence. Consumers tend to have a rosier outlook on the U.S. economy in the first year a Democrat is in the White House. "Yet the superior growth record under Democrats is not forecastable by standard techniques, which means it cannot be attributed to superior initial conditions," they write. Chalk this one up to luck again, but it does come "tantalizingly close to a self-fulfilling prophecy in which consumers correctly expect the economy to do better under Democrats, then make that happen by purchasing more consumer durables."

McAfee report paints grim picture of lucrative industry, despite incomplete data. Cybercrime could be costing the global economy as much as $575 billion annually, according to a new report from McAfee. The Intel-owned security company based its estimate on a range of sources, from government agencies to NGOs and academic institutions, counting both direct and indirect costs. The report, Estimating the Global Cost of Cybercrime explained the methodology as follows: "This study assumes that the cost of cybercrime is a constant share of national income, adjusted for levels of development. We calculated the likely global cost by looking at publically available data from individual countries, buttressed by interviews with government officials and experts. We looked for confirming evidence for these numbers by looking at data on IP theft, fraud, or recovery costs. In addition to a mass of anecdotes, we ultimately found aggregate data for 51 countries in all regions of the world who account for 80% of global income. We used this data to estimate the global cost, adjusting for differences among regions." However, the vendor cautioned that "differences in the thoroughness of national accounting", as well as underreporting of incidents and the difficulty of valuing IP all make calculations an imprecise art. High income countries lost more as a percentage of GDP, which could be because they have better accounting systems in place and/or that their IP is more valuable and therefore a bigger target for criminals. The $575bn figure therefore comes from extrapolating a global total from high loss countries. It could be as low as $375bn if McAfee had extrapolated from "all countries where we could find open source data".