Bank finance articles and tips

The tax deduction of expenses incurred during volunteer charitable work is examined extensively in tax preparation courses. An established principle is that no deduction is permitted for the value of a taxpayer's time devoted to charity. However, taxpayers have potential charitable tax deductions for their out-of-pocket expenditures related to volunteering.

The tax deduction for people spending their own money while conducting volunteer work still demands following the procedures in a tax preparation guide for charitable contributions. A Kentucky woman recently learned in tax court that the rules for acknowledgement by a charity apply to payments while volunteering....

The U.S. Misery Index recently hit a 28 year high, going back to 1983. The misery index is the sum of inflation and the unemployment rates and it hit 13 last month. So, it got me to thinking, where did things stand in 1983 and what did the next few years look like?
First, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the unemployment rate in 1982 was 9.7% and then in 1983 it was 9.6%. This compares to an unemployment rate of 9.3% in 2009, 9.6% in 2010 and currently at 9.1% as we near year-end. So, we are now three years into the 9%+ range, with no one predicting a drop by years end.

It has been all over the news for weeks and people everywhere are getting fired-up about it. Even President Obama recently aired his complaints to ABC News, saying it was unfair to customers.

That's right - we're talking about bank fees.

So what's up with these bank fees and why are banks charging them to customers? It's simple economics, really....

Credit cards based on chip-and-PIN technology continue to make inroads in the United States, according to two recently released studies. It's time for merchants - and their merchant services providers - to brace themselves for the transition from magnetic stripe to chip-and-PIN credit card processing.

Chip-and-PIN relies on a microprocessor chip to store account data on the card and a PIN (personal identification number) to "unlock" it at the point of sale. Also known as the EMV (Europay-MasterCard-Visa) standard, it is considered more secure than the mag stripe technology that has been the basis of credit card processing for more than 40 years. Few great technological inventions such as the credit card mag strip have endured for so long without any innovations.

Forex online trading had always been an underrated profession till only recently, when the web itself catapulted it into the limelight. Once it had been recognized by potential investors as well as forex online entrepreneurs as a great opportunity to make money as well as build a huge capital-oriented network in the cash-rich currency market, learning forex has been one of the chief aims of people around the world.

However, considering the fact that this whole profession had been shrouded in an enigma until now, there are considerably a large number of myths that surround forex for beginners.