Image courtesy of Revell Books.

Book Review
Title: “7 Money Rules for Life: How to Take Control of Your Financial Future“
Author: Mary Hunt
Publisher: Revell, 2012; 208 pages; $17.99

I used to dread almost everything about money except making it, spending it and giving it (charitably). Tracking it, budgeting it, planning around it: That all felt like minutiae I had zero time, energy or interest in, and I told myself the myth that if I simply made enough, the rest would take care of itself.

Suffice it to say, that’s just not how it works. Even Oprah still signs the big checks.

Eventually, after some money dramas and an intense course in self-education, including a course in Conscious Bookkeeping, I came to see things in almost exactly the opposite light. I find the ability to live without money crises and the experience of planning, projecting and even monitoring my money matters to be completely soothing: It’s like the ultimate self-care.

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The feeling of having control and mastery of your money matters is a feeling, I’ve realized, that most Americans don’t have. Many feel like their debt and spending and even incomes are entirely out of their control; others feel like they are powerless over money; still others err on the other extreme of the spectrum, being so stingy and obsessive about cash that they experience no enjoyment from what they do have whatsoever.

Enter Mary Hunt, founder and publisher of Debt-Free Living, an organization specializing in personal finance education and tools. Hunt is a former spending addict whose fondness for “buy-now-pay-later” shopping and an encounter with a get-rich business scheme wound her family on the brink of bankruptcy. She and her husband toiled their way back from that brink, eventually processing their experiences and learnings into Debt-Free Living.

Hunt explains that her two most daunting obstacles at the beginning of her financial recovery were (a) her utter financial ignorance, beyond how to kite checks and juggle credit card balances, and (b) the overwhelm she felt at the prospect of trying to unravel a financial catastrophe. Now, to help others who are facing down their own post-recession finance dramas eliminate their own financial illiteracy and overwhelm, Hunt has just published “7 Money Rules of Life: How to Take Control of Your Financial Future.”

Here are three of those rules:

1. Spend less than you earn. You might be thinking, as my Millennial friends are wont to say: “Obvi!” (The -ous, apparently, is implied.) But the age-old (and unlikely to change anytime soon) personal finance adage about spending less than you earn is somewhat akin to its personal fitness cousin, eat less and move more: Everyone knows it’s true, but many still fail to do it.

So, Hunt starts at the very beginning with this cardinal rule, and a number of specific strategies for people who are already living paycheck to paycheck, and debting to cover everything else. Nothing here is revolutionary — Hunt’s tips for what she calls “widening the gap between income and expenses” are uber-basics like staying away from the stores, limiting your exposure to ads, living on cash (i.e., no plastic allowed) and even getting a side job.

But that’s very consistent with my own experience of getting into financial integrity: there are no tricks. Sometimes it’s helpful, though, for someone who’s been there to cut through all the financial wizardry and “guru”-dom out there and just spell it out, plain and simple. That’s what Hunt does here.

2. Anticipate your irregular expenses. I know some money gurus advocate strongly for an emergency fund, but I also know that many financially stable people scoff at the notion on grounds that life is nothing but emergencies, so living on less than you make as a rule puts you in good stead. Hunt falls into the former camp, encouraging readers to save enough cash that they could cover all their living expenses for six months with no paycheck in the event of a layoff or medical problem — separate and apart from their retirement savings.

In her discussion of this rule, Hunt exemplifies her general approach, deactivating the overwhelm and common objections at the daunting target dollar amount for this savings by acknowledging them, then tackling them head on with excuse-killing strategies and very clear instructions on how to execute this rule, motivationally and logistically speaking.

3. Tell your money where to go. Hunt confesses her own aversion to the concept of a restrictive budget and educates readers about how she replaced it with the concept of a directional spending plan, which she describes lovingly as being “like strapping on a pair of wings and learning how to fly.”

Like every good money maven, Hunt encourages readers to lay out their income and expenses, on paper, and prods them with the power and the purpose of the spending plan they can create as a result. She then walks readers through the process of creating a spending plan in whatever way makes sense for them, on- or offline, and revisiting and tweaking it until it is accurate and functioning to serve its purpose: “not to force you into a life of deprivation but rather to prevent overspending, which will keep you from falling into debt.”

Nothing about “7 Money Rules” involves surprising tricks or secret strategies. It’s all basic. But it’s all there. And if you’re struggling with the overwhelm or simply don’t even know where to begin the process of seizing control over your finances, “7 Money Rules” is an uber-approachable, clear and actionable place to begin.

Q: We just bought a house in Alameda, Calif. It was built in the 1930s and hasn’t been touched since. We got it for a good price and are viewing renovations as a long-term project. We had a termite inspection, a roof inspection and a home inspection.

A little termite work was done under the house, and the home inspector pointed out some problems, mainly with the electrical system. The roof has a few more years of life left and no evidence of leaks. The wiring is old knob and tube, so plugs are not plentiful.

Our plan is to move in and renovate as time and budget allow. We’re a bit strapped now, but want to make the house our home as much as possible.

We’d appreciate any suggestions you guys might have since you’ve both walked a mile in our moccasins.

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A: We wish you good luck and a lot of fun with your renovation. When you’re done, the pride in having done it yourself will be huge.

Before you do anything else, have a licensed commercial electrician give the place a thorough going-over.

Besides the knob and tube, our guess is that you have an undersize service panel with fuses instead of circuit breakers. Modern appliances, such as a microwave or a hair dryer, put more of a load on the wiring than it was designed for. You probably will have to part with several thousand dollars for a new 200-amp service. So, take a deep breath and write the check to get your wiring updated and safe.

Now it gets a lot less expensive.

The easiest way to make a house a home is paint. Painting with your colors makes the house fresh, clean and yours. Do one room at a time. Like everything, there’s a right way to do it. Here’s how:

• First, cover the floors with drop cloths. This part can be omitted if you’re going to clean the carpet with the help of professionals from Carpet Cleaning Louisville or have hardwood floors to be refinished soon.
• Wash the walls and woodwork with a solution of trisodium phosphate (TSP) to remove any dirt or grease. Rinse the walls with clear water to remove any TSP residue.
• Use painter’s masking tape (blue or green) to mask the edges of baseboards, door trim and window trim. The blue and green versions are less sticky and won’t take the paint off when removed.
• “V” out any cracks in the walls or ceiling with the point of a teardrop-shaped paint scraper. Vacuum any plaster dust from the floor, edges of baseboard and the cracks. Fill the holes with Spackle or patching plaster. Sand the patches smooth. Vacuum again.
• Spray the patches with a primer such as Bulls Eye.
• Fill any holes and repair any dings in the wood trim. If the paint on the trim is chipped, feather the edges with sandpaper.

Now it’s time for paint. The rule is to work from top to bottom: ceiling first, walls next, finishing with door frames, window frames and baseboards.

If the walls and the ceiling are to be the same color, use a 2 1/2-inch angled sash brush to paint a 6-inch-wide swath of paint on the sides of all corners of the ceiling and the walls. If the ceiling and walls are going to be different colors, just cut in the ceiling, making sure to cover the joint where the wall and ceiling intersect. Don’t worry if you get a little paint on the walls. You’ll be using masking tape on the ceiling to give a straight line for the walls. The wall color will cover any overage.

Paint the rest of the ceiling using a 3/8-inch nap roller. Start in a corner and roll out a 3-by-3-foot square. Draw an “M,” then roll across the “M” to get uniform coverage on the square. Smooth out any edges left by the roller by lightly rolling over them. Continue with this method, always working to a wet edge.

If the walls are a different color, use masking tape on the ceiling to ensure a straight line. Use the same technique to paint the walls. Cut in the corners with a brush. Paint a 6-inch patch at the base and around window and door openings. Paint an “M” with the roller, fill it in, smooth out irregularities, repeat and work to a wet edge.

The final step is to paint the doors and windows. Make sure the walls are dry. Mask the edges and paint the wood using the same sash brush you used to cut in the corners of the walls and ceilings. Remove the masking tape, take up the drop cloths and you’re done. The room is now yours.

Happy renovating, and let us know how it goes.

Movie set image via Shutterstock.

Editor’s note: The following item is republished with permission of AOL Real Estate. See the original article: Malibu Homeowner DeeAnna Staats Turns House Sale Into a Hollywood Production.

By KRISANNE ALCANTARA

You might think the video below is the trailer for Hollywood’s next big summer blockbuster. But it’s actually the listing for one woman’s $35 million Malibu house.

DeeAnna Staats hired Hollywood movie director Graham Henman to shoot the three-minute film, called “The Spider and the Fly,” with Hans Zimmer Studios (which produced the musical score of “The Lion King,” “Gladiator” and “True Romance”) as the masterminds behind the soundtrack.

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The movie, which will take the place of a regular listing, will be sent out by Staats to prospective buyers across the United States and the globe — on gift-wrapped iPads.

You can pause for a moment to think about that (and take a look at the gorgeous home in the gallery below).

Photo Credit: DeeAnna Staats. See the full photogallery here.

“I wanted to present [the home] to buyers in a creative way that would give them a real sense of the place,” explained Staats, owner of luxury-home-furnishing and interior-design company Staats & Co. “[It’s] a unique and very emotional house.”

Though Staats won’t disclose exactly how much it cost to produce the short film, she did concede that it was a “full Hollywood production” — one that’s already been downloaded and sent out on 100 brand-new iPads.

Christened the “Carbon Mesa,” the 9,500-square-foot Malibu mansion sits high above California’s “Billionaire’s Beach.” It features 4,500 square feet of outdoor patio space, six enormous bedrooms, nine bathrooms, a movie theater and a wine cellar that can store more than 800 bottles. That’s grandeur that, as far as we know, is surpassed only by Gianni Versace’s Miami palace and the newly-listed, $58 million “La Palais” in nearby Beverly Hills.

But if you think that you have to be a multimillionaire to create a snazzy short film to reel in prospective buyers, you’re wrong. Though not all of us have access to Hollywood directors, an increasing number of owners and Realtors are getting behind the camera themselves to dabble in some video marketing — and it’s working.

Eric Lavey, an agent with Keller Williams Realty in Beverly Hills, produced a short movie about a Hollywood Hills listing, marketing it as a sizzling bachelor’s home. The sexy two-minute flick snagged a buyer for the $969,000 property in less than 30 days.

And who could forget the risque, black-and-white short film produced by Neo Property in Australia? The, er, cheeky video features models strolling through the spectacular beachfront Queensland home in the buff. The home, valued at $2.19 million, sold after just 3,800 hits on the Internet. (Wonder how many of those were repeat views?).

We imagine the fate of Carbon Mesa to be quite similar — especially with those iPad freebies and all.

Mortgage rates broke records again this week as fears that the European debt crisis will slow the global economy had investors moving money out of stocks and into safer investments like Treasuries and bonds that fund most mortgage loans.

Rates on 30-year fixed-rate mortgage averaged 3.56 percent with an average 0.7 point for the week ending July 12, down from 3.62 percent last week and 4.51 percent a year ago, Freddie Mac said in releasing the results of its weekly Primary Mortgage Market Survey. That’s a new all-time low in Freddie Mac records dating to 1971, and rates on 30-year loans have now been below 4 percent for 16 consecutive weeks.

For 15-year fixed-rate mortgages, rates averaged 2.86 percent with an average 0.7 point, down from 2.89 percent last week and 3.65 percent a year ago. That’s also an all-time low in records dating to 1991, and rates on 15-year loans have been below 3 percent for seven weeks.

Rates on five-year Treasury-indexed hybrid adjustable-rate mortgage (ARM) loans averaged 2.74 percent with an average 0.6 point, down from 2.79 percent last week and 3.29 percent a year ago. That’s an all-time low in records dating to 2005.

For one-year Treasury-indexed ARM loans, rates averaged 2.69 percent with an average 0.4 point, up from 2.68 percent last week but down from 2.95 percent a year ago. Last week’s rate for one-year ARMs was an all-time low in records dating to 1984.

A separate survey by the Mortgage Bankers Association showed that while demand for purchase loans was up a seasonally adjusted 3 percent during the week ending July 6 compared to the week before, purchase loan applications were down 3 percent from a year ago.

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At their June 19-20 meeting, members of the Federal Reserve’s Open Market Committee were told by Fed staffers that while the “housing sector generally improved in recent months,” it was “still restrained by tight credit standards for mortgage loans and the substantial inventory of foreclosed and distressed properties,” according to minutes of the meeting.

Most committee members attending the meeting “anticipated that housing markets were likely to recover only slowly over time, in part because tight credit standards in mortgage lending meant that low mortgage rates were now generating less of a pickup in home sales and construction than had been the case during the recoveries from earlier recessions,” the minutes said.

A few committee members were more optimistic about the potential “for a sizable upturn in housing activity.”

In an attempt to encourage lending, the European Central Bank this week reduced short-term, overnight interest rates to zero — a level reached by the Fed in 2008.

In response, banks pulled nearly half a trillion euros in deposits out of the European Central Bank, but there are doubts that they’ll make more loans to businesses and consumers, as intended, Reuters reports. Banks had parked much of the 1 trillion in Euros that the European Central Bank injected into the economy in December and February.

If banks don’t boost lending, European Central Bank policymakers said they still have other options. In the U.S., after gradually reducing the federal funds overnight rate to zero in 2007 and 2008, the Fed embarked on two major rounds of “quantitative easing” to stimulate the economy. The government bought up Treasuries and bonds that fund mortgages to reduce the cost of borrowing.

With U.S. economic growth slowing, there’s increasing talk that the Fed may embark on a third round of quantitative easing, or “QE3.”

Minutes of the Federal Open Market Committee’s last meeting show that members were nearly unanimous in their continued support for “Operation Twist,” in which the Fed keeping a lid on long-term rates by using the proceeds from $267 billion in maturing short-term Treasury bills to buy up $44 billion a month in long-term T-bills.

The committee agreed that the Fed should also continue reinvesting principal payments from its holdings of mortgage-backed securities (MBS) guaranteed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac into more of the same investments.

While the committee agreed that it was prepared to take “further action as appropriate” — such as a QE3 program — to promote a stronger economic recovery and job growth, only a few members were ready to take such action in June, the minutes reveal.

At some point, some members of the committee warned, the government’s purchases of Treasuries could have the opposite of the intended effect.

If investors believe the government is buying up too much debt, some committee members worried there could be a “deterioration in the functioning of the Treasury securities market that could undermine the intended effects of the policy.” In other words, interest rates might go up, instead of down — a problem already being experienced by a number of countries in Europe.

Before embarking on QE3, “a few members observed that it would be helpful to have a better understanding of how large the Federal Reserve’s asset purchases would have to be to cause a meaningful deterioration in securities market functioning, and of the potential costs of such deterioration for the economy as a whole,” the meeting minutes said.

The Federal Open Market Committee is scheduled to hold four more meetings this year — including three meetings before the Nov. 6 election: July 31, Sept. 12, and Oct. 23.

Joe Gagnon, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, told Bloomberg that the Fed could take action as early as its Sept. 12 meeting.

Wells Fargo Bank has reached a settlement with the U.S. Department of Justice to resolve allegations that the bank systematically discriminated against African American and Hispanic borrowers.

The Justice Department claims that Wells Fargo — the largest home mortgage originator in the U.S. — steered about 34,000 African American and Hispanic borrowers into riskier and more expensive subprime loans between 2004 and 2009, or charged them higher rates and fees than white borrowers.

Wells Fargo, which denies the claims, will pay $125 million to wholesale borrowers the Justice Department believes were victims of discrimination due to their race or national origin.

Wells Fargo will also pay $50 million to seven metro areas the justice department has determined to have a high number of impacted borrowers and were hard-hit by the housing crisis: Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, D.C.-Va.-Md.-W.Va.; Chicago-Naperville-Joliet, Ill.-Ind.-Wis.; Philadelphia-Camden-Wilmington, Pa.-N.J.-Del.-Md.; San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, Calif.; New York-Northern New Jersey-Long Island, N.Y.-N.J.-Pa.; Cleveland-Elyria-Mentor, Ohio; and Riverside-San Bernardino-Ontario, Calif.

See related story: BofA settles Countrywide discrimination charges for $335M

In addition, Wells Fargo has agreed to conduct an internal review of subprime loans made to Hispanic and African American borrowers through its retail lending division between 2004 and 2008. Any compensation paid out to victims of discrimination identified by the retail review will be in addition to the $125 million set aside for wholesale borrowers.

“The department’s action makes clear that we will hold financial institutions accountable, including some of the nation’s largest, for lending discrimination,” said Deputy Attorney General James M. Cole in a statement.

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“An applicant’s creditworthiness, and not the color of his or her skin, should determine what loans a borrower qualifies for. With today’s settlement, the federal government will ensure that African-American and Hispanic borrowers who were discriminated against will be entitled to compensation and borrowers in communities hit hard by this housing crisis will have an opportunity to access homeownership.”

In an announcement, Wells Fargo noted that “the claims primarily relate to mortgages priced and sold to consumers by independent mortgage brokers” in its wholesale mortgage program. Wells Fargo said it cannot “set loan prices for independent mortgage brokers nor control the combined effect of the negotiations that thousands of these independent mortgage brokers conduct with their customers.”

The company also announced that it was voluntarily discontinuing its mortgage wholesale program, which currently makes up 5 percent of the company’s mortgage loan volume.

After July 13, Wells Fargo will no longer accept new applications for loans originated by independent mortgage brokers through its wholesale channel, but will work to ensure existing applications are processed and closed, the company said.

In a statement, Mike Heid, president of Wells Fargo Home Mortgage, said the bank was settling “to avoid a long and costly legal fight, and to instead devote our resources to continuing to contribute to the country’s housing recovery.”

“Wells Fargo takes pride in serving the home ownership needs of all of our customers, and we are fully committed to fair and responsible lending. Through our separate decision to no longer fund mortgages through independent mortgage brokers, we can control how that commitment is met on every mortgage that Wells Fargo makes,” Heid said.

In a statement, the Center for Responsible Lending called the settlement “welcome news.”

“The impact of discriminatory pricing on African-American and Latino communities has been severe and will take generations to remedy. We commend DOJ for pursuing this and other cases to address pricing discrimination and the steering of borrowers into bad home loans,” the organization said.

This is the second-largest fair lending settlement in the history of the Department of Justice. The largest was a $335 million settlement reached last December with Bank of America to settle charges that Countrywide Financial Corp. and its subsidiary discriminated against more than 200,000 African-American and Hispanic borrowers by charging them higher fees and interest rates on mortgage loans made from 2004 through 2008.

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A self-aggrandized breach of nearly 450,000 Yahoo Voices account passwords Wednesday has troubling implications for data security practices during corporate acquisitions of Web service providers. The Yahoo Voices service includes content from the company’s 2011 purchase of Associated Content.

The password breach was posted on a public website by a group of hackers identified as D33Ds Company, which claims to have obtained the plain text file of accounts and password information using a union-based SQL injection, where false SQL database commands are entered into a site’s Web interface to obtain data not normally available for public consumption.

Yahoo has confirmed that the breach occurred on its Contributor Network, which is how the company refers to the Yahoo Voices service. In a statement to TechCrunch, Yahoo acknowledged the breach and said that it was taking steps to correct the vulnerability that allowed the SQL injection to occur.

“We confirm that an older file from Yahoo! Contributor Network (previously Associated Content) containing approximately 400,000 Yahoo! and other company users names and passwords was stolen yesterday, July 11. Of these, less than 5% of the Yahoo! accounts had valid passwords. We are fixing the vulnerability that led to the disclosure of this data, changing the passwords of the affected Yahoo! users and notifying the companies whose users accounts may have been compromised,” the statement read in part.

How Bad Was It?

Yahoo’s statement, meant to assuage concerns over how many valid passwords were actually revealed, may actually raise more questions. According to Säkerhetsbloggen, there were some 342,478 unique entries revealed in their analysis of the breached passwords.

But how literal was Yahoo’s 5% statement? Taking just the Yahoo-based domains discovered in the breach adds up to a grand total of 143,040 accounts, of which only 7,152 (or less) were actually active accounts.

It is not clear if Yahoo’s statement specified only Yahoo account information and not the remaining 199,438 accounts also revealed in the breach. (The New York Times says affected accounts also belonged to Gmail, AOL, Hotmail, Comcast, MSN, SBC Global, Verizon, BellSouth and Live.com users.) And even if Yahoo’s statement applied to the entire set of accounts, that’s still more than 17,000 active accounts exposed to the wild.

Whose Fault Was It?

Other questions yet unanswered include the vulnerability of the older Associated Content data itself. The content farm was acquired by Yahoo in May 2011, and had some 380,000 contributors and 16 million monthly visitors, which Yahoo quickly added to its portfolio in the form of the Yahoo Voices service.

Many observers have noted that the passwords appeared to have been stored completely unencrypted. So did Yahoo also inherit a security hole when it bought Associated Content in 2011? Or was the vulnerability something that cropped up during the service’s 14 months in Yahoo’s custody?

If Yahoo failed to do due security diligence when it integrated the Associated Content network, that’s a disturbing notion to consider in any future acquisitions. And, if Yahoo did take a hard look at Associated Content’s security measures, and this was a Yahoo-specific problem, how many other Yahoo servers remain affected by the same SQL vulnerability? And how much other user data is stored without encryption?

No matter the answers to these questions, Yahoo users – and users of any Web services – should pay attention to their potential vulnerabilities any time a service is acquired by a new owner.