Curious Cat Investing, Economics and Personal Finance Carnival #16

Welcome to the Curious Cat Investing and Economics Carnival: find useful recent personal finance, investing and economics blog posts.

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• A 401k With Employer Matching is More Liquid Than You Think by Kevin McKee – “If your employer offers 401k matching, it’s simple: max it out. The one thing you’ll want to check is when the money is vested. All 401k money is immediately vested at my company, so once the match is in the account, it’s yours.”
• Potential Euro Collapse & Rapid Redistribution Of Personal Wealth – “When we look at these two situations, what we can plainly see is that there is a massive redistribution of wealth that goes on when we have monetary crises. Millions of innocent people who’ve been playing by the rules and responsibly saving and investing are financially devastated. Other millions of people are enjoying lucrative profits and tax-advantaged surges in their personal net worth.”
• 3 Dividend Growth Stocks selected by Gordon Model by Norman Tweed – “What this tells you is that constant future dividend growth is additional yield. Gordon speaks about earnings growth also in the paper. However, this is a highly conservative usage, leaving out pure growth stocks and concentrating on yield only. It is most applicable for utilities and slow growth rate stocks.”
• 6 Online Retirement Planning Tools You Need to Know by Ryan Guina – “if your situation is more complicated, then it may be worth looking into a tool such as Maximize My Social Security, which costs $40 annually. This tool can help you determine the best strategy for maximizing your social security benefit. This tool can be especially helpful when you may need to decide when to collect retiree, spousal, survivor, divorcee, parent, or child benefits.”
• Public debt in the Eurozone, Japan, and the US by Charles Wyplosz – “Europe’s public debt outlook has deteriorated because of its ageing population and the global economic and financial crisis. Absent corrective action, public debts are projected to rise from 59% to 128% GDP by 2035 – and much more for some countries. In addition to the usual national common-pool problem, the Eurozone suffers from an international common-pool problem whereby individual countries may be led to expect support from others, including through bailouts as is currently the case.”
• Eight Little-Known Facts about the Roth IRA by Jeff Rose – “Since 2010, there are new conversion rules that apply to the transferring of funds from a traditional IRA or 401(k) to a Roth IRA. When you convert from a tax-deferred retirement account to a tax-free retirement account, you’ll potentially see many benefits long term. It’s important to remember that the IRS isn’t going to forget about the taxation of this money. Whatever amount you transfer to the Roth IRA will be tacked on to your earned income (and taxed at your current rate) for the year of the conversion.”
• Chart of Largest Petroleum Consuming Countries from 1980 to 2010 by John Hunter – “The USA remains, by a huge margin, the largest consumer of petroleum products using 22% of the total (with about 4.5% of the population). From 1980 to 2010 the global consumption increased 38% to 87 million barrels a day.”