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Happy 2013! I hope your holidays were filled with laughter, joy, cool presents, warm memories and a few genealogical discoveries! Did you make your New Year’s resolutions yet? I resolved to lose 40 pounds, and even though I lost it, I ended up finding it again! Please keep your genealogical resolutions separate from your regular goals for the new year. For one thing, you want to actually try to accomplish the genealogical ones! I don’t want you all to give up too easily. So what should be your goal this year? That is a complicated question. I have written a …

The “no doc” or no-income-documentation loan was a type of mortgage that required little or no income verification. This loan was put together on behalf of self-employed or commission workers who tend to write off expenses or who use different taxes breaks to lower their income to pay less in income taxes. The way the loan worked, you would state what your income was but it was not verified. So if you said that you made $10,000 gross per month, that is the amount that was used to see if you could be approved for the mortgage. Typically, you would …

It never fails. Prospective clients come into the office who are very old or very ill, proclaiming that they have powers of attorney. We take one look at the documents and realize that they are outdated and nearly worthless. Why? Because their powers of attorney are just “plain-vanilla.” There are no specific authorizations inserted for * public benefits planning, Medicaid, Medicare, etc. * Social Security elections * retirement planning elections * gifting for Medicaid benefits planning or tax planning * account changes * options for housing changes * tax planning authority Be careful though, some of these powers can create …

Whether your purchasing a home or living in it, it’s crucial that you check it for radon levels, and take appropriate actions if there are problems. A radioactive gas, radon is the second leading cause of lung cancer in the United States, according to the Surgeon General. Colorless and odorless, radon can only be detected using the proper equipment. Radon can enter your home through many different avenues. Since the air pressure in your home is typically lower than the pressure underneath the foundation, your home acts like a vacuum drawing the gas inside. The most common way is through …

In a number of columns, I have mentioned the massive project by the Mormons (Latter Day Saints or LDS) to take the 2.5 million microfilms they have created over the decades, and to digitize and index them. Digitizing is just the process of converting a film image to a digital image for the internet. They have to do that project on their own because the film is in their possession. Indexing the records is another matter. Each microfilm has about 1500-2000 images. Each image may have 1 record or many. For example, a register is a list of 50 names …

It’s almost holiday time and it’s getting colder out. Time to cut back on visits to cemeteries and libraries and think about the future. As active as I am in the genealogy community, I fall behind on some basic genealogy duties. It’s time to update the photos in my collection, and specifically on my family tree charts. Most of the time, I forget to get new pictures of people, and I think about it only when relatives call me up and ask me for a copy of the family tree. They usually want a copy because the 9-year-old grandson has …

The Federal Reserve has made its most aggressive move ever! On Sept. 13, the Fed announced a third round of bond buying, called Qualitative Easing, or QE, increasing its purchase of mortgage bonds to $40 billion per month from the average of $15 billion per month that they were previously buying. They also announced that this is an open-ended program with no end date, and that their short-term rates would remain low until 2015. In the past, the Fed has always put an amount that they would buy monthly, and also when they would stop. The Fed’s official statement noted …

When you or a loved one become unable to completely take care of yourself, the question, “What care option is best?” becomes important to answer. While it is important to consider one’s personal wants and needs, it is equally important to weigh out what the future may hold in terms of changes in the type of care needed. With care being so expensive today, you may need to look into applying for VA benefits or Medicaid to help pay for your care, adding another challenge to balancing and planning for the care that may be needed. The following is meant …

It took four months, but the 1940 U.S. Census is finally fully indexed! I don’t remember how long it took for them to index the 1930 census, but that was released 10 years ago. Frankly, I don’t remember what I ate for lunch today! Now that the census is fully indexed, you no longer have to use the old method of trying to find people based on their address. This method is still valid, but now that all names are online, you can search by name and skip the middle man. Even though the census is now completely done, it …

Most people think that the bank they make their mortgage payment to actually owns the mortgage, but in most cases, the bank that you make your payment to just services the mortgage and it is ultimately owned by one of the two mortgage giants. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac where chartered back in the early ’70s, and later became public companies that were traded on the stock exchange. The purpose of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac was to raise funds from investors to purchase mortgages from banks. Fannie and Freddie will sell bonds called “Mortgage Backed Securities,” or MBS, that …