Technology And Consumer Staples Rule The Sector ETF Roost
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A little over two years since it took on the credit card industry, the federal government has found a fresh villain: telecommunications fraudsters. Earlier this week, the Federal Communications Commission proposed new rules designed to crack down on "phone cramming," a widespread, illegal practice that robs billions of dollars from phone users.Officially, the FCC defines cramming as "the illegal placement of an unauthorized fee onto a consumer's monthly phone bill." Often ranging from $1.99 to $19.99 apiece, these charges are designed to be overlooked. While they sometimes have names like "psychic," "membership," or "mail server," they more often have innocuous titles like "service charge," "minimum monthly usage fee" or "other fees." For the third-party companies that tack these expenses onto your bill, the goal is to create a name that sounds vaguely official and will be ignored by most customers. To this end, many companies also tuck the fees in with a long list of other, more legitimate charges.
Death by a Thousand Cuts
While cramming charges may be relatively small individually, they add up: According to a report issued by the Senate last week, "Telephone companies place approximately 300 million third-party charges on their customers' bills each year, which amount to more than $2 billion worth of third-party charges on telephone bills every year." These charges hit phone users across the spectrum, from military organizations to government groups to businesses to individual consumers.
Part of the reason that phone cramming has been so successful is because the deck is stacked against consumers. Phone bills are already complicated, which makes it hard for customers to recognize that they're being crammed. What's more, even if they find problems with their bills, most customers don't know where to go to complain, and are often given the run-around by their phone companies.
The FCC's strategy attempts to combat the problem at several levels. As Joel Gurin, chief of the FCC's Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau, explains: "When it comes to cramming, we have three goals: We want to make it easier for consumers to prevent it, detect it, and redress it." The commission's proposed new rules directly reflect this strategy. To begin with, they would change the look of phone bills: Instead of mixing third-party charges together with more legitimate fees, the new rules would require that phone bills clearly separate the phone company's charges from those of third parties. This clear delineation would make it much easier for customers to identify crammed fees.
If passed, the final proposed rule could fundamentally change the entire cramming problem: It would require many phone companies to inform customers that they can block any and all third-party charges. However, not all companies allow users to opt-out of these charges -- and the proposed rule change would not require phone companies to make this option available.
The Next Steps
Now that the proposed rules have been sent out, the FCC will move on to the public comment period: After any proposed FCC rule change is announced, the public has 60 days to comment on it, after which the FCC takes another 30 days to review the comments before amending its rules. While the commission is soliciting comments from a variety of industry groups and professionals, Gurin emphasizes that he wants to hear from the public: "We would like to hear from ordinary citizens," he notes. "Public comment is very important in any rule-making process."
If you would like to comment about the FCC's new proposed cramming rules, simply click on this link. The text of the proposed rule, 11-116, is visible here, and Gurin's comments on it can be found here. If you have any cramming complaints, you can reach the FCC here.
Bruce Watson is a senior features writer for DailyFinance. You can reach him by e-mail at bruce.watson@teamaol.com, or follow him on Twitter at @bruce1971.
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God is doing something in the realm of stewardship right now. Patrick Johnson of National Christian Foundation has seen it first-hand. Pastors are seeing the need for stewardship training, and many people are hungry for it.
There are two key areas that have helped to open pastors? eyes.
One is that budgets have been flat or down for most churches lately. ?That?s been a good wake-up call.? Leaders want to address the issue, get leaner, and get rid of church debt as a result. ?It?s like when we get overweight and it finally starts to bug us enough to do something about it,? he said.
The other is a shift from focusing on what you?re taking in to where it?s going. There?s a more external focus. ?Bigger barns are not where it?s at anymore.? He knows of some churches that are working toward a 50-50 model that involves giving away half of what comes in.
Not focusing on building buildings or raising funds frees us to focus on the biblical meaning of stewardship. Yes, giving is a factor, but maybe not in the way so many think about it.
Patrick encourages church leaders that the tithe is just the starting point of generosity. He says that most people could tithe in our culture. If their boss came in and cut their income by 10%, most people wouldn?t go bankrupt! ?I think we need to go way past the tithe.?
Two of the most famous passages on giving (2 Corinthians 8 and 9) don?t talk about the tithe. ?They compare giving to Christ?s sacrificial gift. They compare giving to churches that were in poverty but give out of their own need.?
A church can have a history of giving without being generous. ?Generous churches are led by generous people,? he said. ?Start living it out. You can?t take people where you haven?t been.?
Above all, Patrick reminds us to focus on the gospel. It?s motivating to be led by a generous pastor who focuses on the gospel.
?Somebody said, ?If you stare at Jesus long enough, you?ll become a giver; if you give long enough, you?ll become more like Christ,?? he said. ?I believe that if you stare at the cross long enough, you?ll be a giver.?
Dave Ramsey has created a program called Momentum to help churches teach their congregations what it means to live out biblical generosity. Momentum is all about bringing people back to God?s view of money management and cultivating a culture of lasting generosity. Discover today how Momentum can help your congregation.
How generous is your church? It?s not an easy question to answer, but Patrick Johnson, Senior Vice President at National Christian Foundation, has helped churches all over the country do it with something they call the Generosity Diagnostic. You can learn more about it at nationalchristian.com. Patrick also shares a helpful look at five attributes of a generous church in this video.
Source: http://www.daveramsey.com/article/a-new-focus-in-stewardship/lifeandmoney_church
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Athletes sign million dollar contracts every year and some are so grossly over compensated that it defies logic. Here are few players who are a good example of that:
Adam Dunn, a slugger who's best years are behind him will earn $12 million this season from the White Sox.
Barry Zito, a former marquee starter with Oakland who turned his success there to a seven-year, $126 million contract that proved to be a terrible investment for the Giants.
Signing a big-time free agent to a team is really a crapshoot. Most players don't get a crack at free agency until they are around thirty-years-old. Every now and then, a team signs a guy that performs at a high level well into his 30s. However, more often than not, the player starts his inevitable fall from grace and the team gets saddled.
We've identified the fifteen most overpaid baseball players for the first half of the 2011 baseball season. We divided half of their yearly salaries by their VORP (Value Over Replacement Player). VORP measures how much a player contributes to their team. An average player's VORP half a season of baseball is around 10. The league leader in VORP this season is Toronto's Jose Bautista with 60.1
2011 Salary: $20,000,000
Value Over Replacement (VORP): 16.1
Statline: .257 BA, 18 HR, 72 RBI, .353 OBP, .828 OPS
Ryan Howard has been paid $621,118 for every point of VORP he's earned so far this season.
Numbers do not lie. Howard currently leads the National League in RBIs, but he hasn't hit a respectable batting average in two full seasons, his VORP is pretty much average, his on-base percentage is very low for someone with so much power, and he's never been a good fielder. Despite all that, Howard is the property of the Phillies until 2016, and they owe him $135 million dollars over that time.
2011 Salary: $10,571,429
VORP: 7.9
Statline: .215 BA, 10 HR, 31 RBI, .319 OBP, .681 OPS
Jayson Werth has been paid $669,077 for each point of VORP he's earned so far this season.
When the Nationals signed Jayson Werth (who has never had a season with more than 100 RBI) to a seven-year, $126 million contract, practically everyone with knowledge of the situation stopped whatever it was they were working on and went outside to reflect on their life choices.
2011 Salary: $14,729,365
VORP: 9.8
Statline: .270 BA, 3 HR, 24 RBI, .330 OBP, .683 OPS
Derek Jeter has been paid $751,498 for every point of VORP he's earned so far this season.
Here's a necessary reminder: Jeter doesn't go 5-for-5 with a home run every single day. The Yankee's captain makes this much money because of what he means to the team and what he has done in the past, not the present.
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Casey Anthony can't leave well enough alone.
On Friday, the former murder suspect's defense team filed a motion to appeal her conviction of lying to law enforcement.
Anthony's team also filed a motion asking the court to consider her "insolvent and unable to pay attorney fees and court costs" stemming from her case, declaring her inability to pay.
As we all await Anthony's first move post-jail, she will undoubtedly find the means to pay for these court costs via media offers.
That is, if Nancy Grace doesn't attack her first.
She is scheduled to be released from jail on Sunday.
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"When it comes to investments," Wikinvest CEO Mike Sha mused in the DailyFinance studio, "there's this overwhelming sea of data out there. One of the challenges that a lot of investors have is really kind of wading through that information, and trying to understand what matters and what doesn't. Part of our approach is to actually pull in a lot of information but then try to synthesize it and present it in ways that are meaningful; and at the same time, hopefully we're cutting out a lot of what users don't have to pay attention to."Wikinvest is an online research portal and portfolio manager featuring user-generated content on stocks, companies, and economic topics. In a February 2008 interview with the Financial Times, the co-founders expressed vast ambitions for the company. "We want to be huge," said Sha, a former manager at Amazon.com. His partner Parker Conrad elaborated: "Eventually, we want to offer coverage of more stocks than Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns combined." That aspiration would soon become significantly easier to realize: Bear Stearns collapsed the following month, and Lehman was gone by the end of September.
The financial crisis focused attention on Wall Street's opacity and propensity for underhanded dealing -- to say nothing of the resultant market volatility, which forced investors large and small to scrutinize their assets with renewed vigor.
"There's always been this inherent conflict of interest," Sha says of the Too Big to Fail financial institutions, where in-house research departments and investment banking divisions provide opportunities for collusion. By contrast, the wiki format allows users to collectively assemble truly unbiased material for consumption by retail investors.
Faster, More Robust Analysis
Wikinvest's intention, according to Sha, is to serve "normal people with investment accounts who need better tools that aren't designed for the day-trader or the super-wealthy person. If you've spent a lot of time looking at financial institution websites, a good portion of them seem to have been built a very long time ago."
Toward that end, the company plans to introduce a new product later this year, a kind of electronic investment adviser built from analyses of a vast multitude of user transactions. "Imagine a system where you have a huge computer analyzing your accounts, comparing millions of different options and different combinations," Sha explains. "I would venture to say that that analysis will be a lot more robust, and will happen in a lot faster of a transaction time, than, say, if you hired a financial adviser, and that guy was supposedly managing your account."
Watch Mike Sha discuss transparency and opacity in the investment industry, as well as some of the hidden costs of doing business with a brokerage:
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With the current financial climate being so gloomy, many people are getting further into personal debt. If you are struggling to cope with your debts, you are not alone! You may have considered filing for bankruptcy. It's made to sound really easy by companies who sell bankruptcy solutions. You'll be able to start afresh, and all your personal debt will be gone.Source: http://ezinearticles.com/6413640
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