I have a friend who recently got a job in the mortgage industry. As I understand it the company “helped” people to avoid foreclosure. In spite of the tough job market, he quit the job a short time later. In talking to him I found out it was due to blatant dishonesty including signature forgery. These guys make money by giving people a “second chance” when they near foreclosure. The reality is, they make people renters in their own home and usually end up taking the house anyway.

Today a guy came in to the bank and told me he thought he’d been the victim of fraud. I asked him what happened. He said he thought he’d been hired by a company that wanted him to open a new arm of their business in the area. To get things started they’d make a $500 deposit into his account, then he would need to take $400 and send a MoneyGram to someone. The additional $100 was his to keep as his new hire bonus, or whatever. He did as told, then suddenly noticed that the $500 had been pulled back out of his account, after he’d already sent the $400 MoneyGram. I immediately told him he was the victim of a scam. [READ MORE]

In these economic times, things are hard enough without someone else screwing up your credit. This series of articles will cover the simple things you can do to make sure you and your family are protected from potential identity theft, or even human errors that could negatively affect your credit.

Note: from what I know and have seen, the best way to really protect your identity is to use a Identity Theft Protection service such as LifeLock or Debix. I haven’t used either, but Debix is very reasonably priced and claims to be the best. They also employ some methods that others don’t.

This first article is a step-by-step guide to remove yourself from mail and phone lists that can potentially lead to someone stealing your identity. This protects you, but it also eliminates junk mail and phone solicitations. Who likes those anyway? [READ MORE]

I work as a Banker for my “day job.”  Because of that I sit in on classes and discuss finances of all sorts with clients and professionals in many areas of expertise, I thought I’d share my unique perspective on the current crisis in two “down to earth” articles.

PART I: HOW WE GOT HERE
America is currently in what some people are calling the worst economic crisis since the great depression. I personally feel that this is an exaggeration and overstatement. The only way this will become as bad as that, is if we create an attitude of self-fulfilling prophecy: we decide everything’s in bad shape, hunker down, and refuse to allow our free-market economy to correct itself. I’ll explain further why I feel this way later. First, lets understand how we got here. [READ MORE]