Complete Finance Blog

This quick, simple guide reveals the best places to save for retirement.

Hardly a week goes by without more bad news appearing about pensions and retirement.

This week, the coalition government is arguing with trade unions about increasing the normal retirement age for public-sector workers. Ministers want to increase this to 66, bringing it in line with planned changes to the state pension.

Predictably, union members have threatened to strike over these proposals to align public-sector pensions with private-sector schemes. Alas, the state pension and public-sector pensions are being battered by two colossal crises.

Nifty Trading Levels for 29 June 2011 Nifty Future Support and Resistance Levels Daily Nifty Level (29 June 2011)
Trading as per the support and resistance levels may be quite useful for intraday and Positional trading in stocks and index. Resistance is termed as the level where the stock generally gets some opposite force before it can go further up. A support is the level where a stock get buying interest before it can fall further. Under the normal market conditions or in the absence of some extremely panic news the support and the resistance levels can act as good levels for initiating the buying / selling. In general it’s advisable to buy the stocks at support levels and sell at the resistance levels. I

Read more…

For the roughly four million homeowners who have fallen behind on their mortgage payments, the federal government is offering yet another remedy: free money to catch up on their loans.

You can get a four-bedroom home for about $60,000 in the most affordable real-estate market, but it’ll cost you as much as $2.5 million in the priciest market. Stacey Delo talks with MarketWatch’s Amy Hoak.

The effort, called the Emergency Homeowners Loan Program, is the latest in the federal government’s efforts to slow down the flood of foreclosures a necessary step to a meaningful recovery in the housing market, says a Department of Housing and Urban Development official. For people who have lost their jobs, the $1 billion program offers loans of up to $50,000 that don’t actually need to be repaid, if applicants meet certain requirements.

The goal, says HUD, is to offer short-term aid to people who look like they’ll be back on their feet soon. But critics say the loans may leave homeowners worse off in the long run.

Read more…

This morning, I got stung by this little f*cker in the shower

I have been stung by fire ants and bees and wasps but nothing hurt as much as this sting.  Right now, my entire foot is pins and needles (not numb, but the painful feeling when your circulation returns) and the toe that got stung really aches.  I also have other weird symptoms like dry mouth.  I also have pins and needles on my tongue and everything I eat or drink tastes funny.

I am lucky my wife got numbness and pins and needs all the way up her thigh from a sting on the foot, and she didnt regain full use of her leg for three days.

I know I will get commenters encouraging a call to poison control.  We have called before.  There is nothing to do short of just gutting it out  (unless one goes into shock, where there is an anti-venom but there are downsides to using it).

Update: The pins and needles have moved halfway up my calf.  This reminds me of those adventure stories (e.g. Lonesome Dove) where one of the characters has gangrene moving up his leg and there is great suspense as to whether they will get to a doctor in time before it reaches his torso.

Update #2:  The tingling is up to my knee now (remember, the sting was in my little toe).  My who

Read more…