I don’t often write this sort of advice, but here’s my household risk management recommendation for the Fall: get your flu shots. Read the full article

The National Association of Personal Financial Advisors (NAPFA), of which I’m a member, is launching a free consumer education webinar series this week. Read the full article

At the height of the credit market crisis last year, there were loud calls for dramatic changes in the regulation of financial institutions. Now that the sturm und drang has ceased, the reforms that will be realized will be much tamer. Read the full article

My final post in recognition of Disability Insurance Awareness Month discusses key factors that can affect the cost of disability insurance. I’ll also touch on the question of how much disability coverage a person needs and discuss the things that you should consider in determining how much disability insurance to buy. Read the full article

If you’re shopping for your own disability coverage (rather than receiving disability insurance as an employer benefit), you'll encounter a myriad of policy differences. You need to understand one of the most critical elements in any disability insurance policy: the definition of what a “disability” is. Read the full article

My first post discussed why you might need disability insurance; today I’d like to explain a few of the important variations in disability coverage. Read the full article

Earlier this month I offered a list of financial planning suggestions for recent college graduates. Since It's often the case that there's a delay period between graduation and the start of a new job, I’d like to expand on one of the items in the list: finding health insurance after graduation. Read the full article

May is Disability Insurance Awareness Month. You won’t be getting any “Happy Disability Insurance Awareness Month” cards, though, because Hallmark™ hasn't caught up to this yet. Read the full article

Last Thursday, I attended an excellent seminar held by State Street Global Advisors and Morningstar. Although the meeting focused on building portfolios with exchange traded funds (ETF's), the highlight of the afternoon was a presentation on the current state of the global markets. Read the full article

College graduation season, which lasts for several weeks, is upon us here in the Boston area. According to the National Postsecondary Student Aid Study (NPSAS), graduating seniors with educational debts carry an average debt load on the order of $20,000. More and more, college students are beginning their working lives with fairly heavy debt loads. It's more important than ever for newly-minted grads to hit the ground running with a plan for their finances. Read the full article

In recent years, health authorities have been urging that nations and businesses should prepare for the possibility of an avian influenza pandemic. Recent news of a serious swine flu outbreak in Mexico has prompted the World Health Organization to declare a phase 4 pandemic alert, meaning that the potential for community-wide outbreaks has been confirmed, but that a full-blown pandemic is not yet certain. Read the full article

Life insurance companies, normally thought of as bastions of stability, have come under greater scrutiny from concern that their holdings of mortgage-backed securities and aggressive annuity guarantees may put their financial stability at risk. Where can you go to determine the strength of your insurer? Read the full article

Many employer-sponsored tax-deferred retirement plans, including 401(k)s, offer a unique investment option called a “stable value” fund. If you’ve invested in such a fund, you should take a close look at what's inside – its value might not be as stable as you think. Read the full article

With short-term Treasuries yielding fractions of a percent, people who need safe investments find they're getting very little for their money. What are the best options for low-risk cash investments right now? Read the full article

My Mac-using friends have another gloating opportunity. Microsoft released an advisory warning of a newly-discovered flaw in multiple versions of Internet Explorer, including IE 7. PCMag.com and BBC News technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones have posts on the problem. The flaw allows software running on hacked web sites to access the contents of your hard drive, run unwanted software, or possibly steal your passwords; as many as 10,000 sites could be infected, according to BBC News.

Microsoft recommends changing IE security settings to high (look under Tools/Internet Options); other protective actions are provided at the advisory link. Alternatively, you may want to download one of the competing (free) browsers, like Firefox, and use it until Microsoft provides a fix. Read the full article

I've written several posts on the asset protection limits available to consumers who have invested in a variety of financial assets. With all the changes and adjustments that have taken place in the last few months in the financial landscape, I thought it might be helpful to provide a single article summarizing the insurance /protections currently available to investors. Read the full article

This completes the series of posts that I started during National Protect Your Identity Week. I'd like to finish by discussing several more ways to avoid becoming a victim of online ID theft. Read the full article

Today I received another bogus e-mail claiming to be from Melrose Cooperative Bank, a bank with which I do no business. It's such an excellent example of the application of social engineering to phishing fraud that I decided to share it.... Read the full article

It looks like this week's discussion on identity theft will probably overflow into next week a bit, because I'm finding new information to share. Having discussed some of the social engineering-based approaches to stealing your private information, today I'd like to take a brief look at how you can protect your computers against more subtle forms of attack. Read the full article

Only about 10 to 15% of identity thefts with known causes have been attributed to online data theft, but this statistic is not very reassuring. According to the Identity Theft Assistance Center, only 42% of ID theft victims are able to determine how their information was stolen. If the majority of victims don't know how their information was stolen, it may not be safe to assume that the 10-15% figure accurately represents all ID theft losses attributable to online sources. How can you avoid being victimized online? Read the full article

The Federal Reserve announced this morning that it is creating a Money Market Investor Funding Facility to ease tensions in the short-term credit markets. Read the full article

Since this week is National Protect Your Identity Week, I’ve decided to post a couple of articles that are largely drawn from a newsletter that I wrote a while ago. The threat of identity theft is real, although as I have noted before, ID theft rates don’t seem to be increasing. Even so, if you aren’t taking precautions to avoid identity theft, you make yourself an easy target. Fraud-related theft tends to increase in times of economic crisis, so it’s wise to be cautious.

The National Foundation for Credit Counseling is spearheading National Protect Your Identity Week; you may want to check out their Protect Your ID site, which has a number of useful resources on this topic. Read the full article

As part of the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008, the level of FDIC insurance coverage has increased as of October 3rd to $250,000. As I noted in an earlier post, it’s possible to have much more than $250,000 of coverage at the same bank, because the coverage depends on the titling of the account. Read the full article

Having discussed why having an emergency fund is a good idea and how big an emergency fund needs to be, I’d now like to talk about investments suitable for an emergency fund. Read the full article

Congress voted down the Troubled Assets Relief Program (“TARP”) legislation, much to the chagrin of the financial markets. At the moment, the markets continue to be in distress, despite a “dead cat bounce” in stocks today. What should you be doing in terms of your household finances? Read the full article

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