Money and Finance

Quick Steps to Financial Stability

This is the eBook version of the printed book. Quick Steps to Financial Stability      Find money you didn't think you had      Deal with your debt      Make the most of tax breaks      Boost your investment returns      Get your kids through college      Ditch the job and retire      Choose the right loan      Save time and money by using our easy-to-follow templates No time to figure it all out on your own? Let Quick Steps to Financial Stability be your guide.   "When it comes to financial self-help advice, Al Lavine and Gail Liberman are as good as it gets. Whether it's setting up a budget, reducing debt, or taking out the right loans, Lavine and Liberman boiled it all down in this latest book to a series of practical steps to make complicated financial planning simple." —David Callaway, editor-in-chief, MarketWatch   Looking to get your finances on track? It's as easy as following the steps outlined in this book. You needn't be an accountant or a financial planner. Get the straight and simple scoop on how to take the bull by the horns yourself—just follow the step-by-step approach outlined in Quick Steps to Financial Stability . Have access to a computer? If so, it's even easier. And there are several online calculators you can use to help you get the job done.   Alan Lavine and Gail Liberman are husband-and-wife syndicated columnists. Their columns run in the Boston Herald , Pittsburgh Post-Gazette , Palm Beach Daily News , several Scripps Howard newspapers, and several online websites. They also write a biweekly consumer banking column for Dow Jones MarketWatch. They have been guests on CBS's The Early Show , Fox and Friends , CNN, CNBC, The 700 Club , and PBS. Their book, Rags to Riches , was featured on Oprah's television show and hit two best-seller lists. They live in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida.  

Regaining the Dream

For the first time, the authors of Regaining the Dream offer data-driven evidence on how the mortgage industry can serve working families in the United States, pointing the way to a pragmatic housing policy that promotes the opportunity for sustainable homeownership.

American Plastic (Mixed media product)

The riveting story of how cosmetic surgery and plastic money melted together to create a subprime mortgage crisis of the body    
 
Plastic surgery has become “the answer” for many Americans, and in American Plastic sociologist Laurie Essig explores how we arrived at this particular solution. Over the last decade there has been a 465 percent increase in cosmetic work, and we now spend over $12 billion annually on procedures like liposuction, face-lifts, tummy tucks, and boob jobs. In this fascinating book, Essig argues that this transformation is the result of massive shifts in both our culture and our economy—a perfect storm of greed, desire, and technology.
 
Plastic is crucial to who we are as Americans, Essig observes. We not only pioneered plastic money but lead the world in our willingness to use it. It’s estimated that 30 percent of plastic surgery patients earn less than $30,000 a year; another 41 percent earn less than $60,000. And since the average cost of cosmetic work is $8,000, a staggering 85 percent of patients assume debt to get work done. Using plastic surgery as a lens on better understanding our society, Essig shows how access to credit, medical advances, and the pressures from an image- and youth-obsessed culture have led to an unprecedented desire to “fix” ourselves.


From the Hardcover edition.

Staying Put (Paperback)

American Plastic (Hardcover)

The riveting story of how cosmetic surgery and plastic money melted together to create a subprime mortgage crisis of the body    
 
Plastic surgery has become “the answer” for many Americans, and in American Plastic sociologist Laurie Essig explores how we arrived at this particular solution. Over the last decade there has been a 465 percent increase in cosmetic work, and we now spend over $12 billion annually on procedures like liposuction, face-lifts, tummy tucks, and boob jobs. In this fascinating book, Essig argues that this transformation is the result of massive shifts in both our culture and our economy—a perfect storm of greed, desire, and technology.
 
Plastic is crucial to who we are as Americans, Essig observes. We not only pioneered plastic money but lead the world in our willingness to use it. It’s estimated that 30 percent of plastic surgery patients earn less than $30,000 a year; another 41 percent earn less than $60,000. And since the average cost of cosmetic work is $8,000, a staggering 85 percent of patients assume debt to get work done. Using plastic surgery as a lens on better understanding our society, Essig shows how access to credit, medical advances, and the pressures from an image- and youth-obsessed culture have led to an unprecedented desire to “fix” ourselves.

Executive Greed

By looking at the three most recent economic crises, the S&L crisis, the dot-com bubble, and the recent subprime mortgage disaster, the author explains why and how corporate managers led their organizations toward disasters in the long-run.

Residential Property Appraisal

This is a classic practitioner's handbook for surveyors involved in the appraisal of residential property for lending purposes. Thus, it will focus on the distinct professional roles required by Mortgage Valuations (MVs) amd Home Buyers Surveys.

China and the Mortgaging of America

In 2008, the economic relationship between the United States and China almost collapsed due to a crisis at two American mortgage corporations, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. This book explains how that crisis came about, and analyzes the consequences and implications.

Financial Engineering and Arbitrage in the Financial Markets (Hardcover)

Many students of financial markets and institutions learn a lot of the descriptive details about types of securities and products traded, but do not gain a real insight into what drives people to trade in these markets.  They leave the classroom still believing that financial trading firms primarily speculate on the direction of the market movements or earn money from fees.  They fail to grasp the concept of relative value arbitrage, which drives most of the trading in today`s fast and interconnected markets. 

This book will teach them what money and capital markets are about through a sequence of arbitrage-based numerical illustrations and exercises enriched with institutional detail.  It will explain to the reader what all the people sitting on the trading floors of financial firms do and why they all sit together.

The new edition builds on the logic of the first book which is that all financial markets, whether for equity, commodities, currencies or credit, have the same structural building blocks. These are in the increasing order of complexity: spot (cash) transactions (immediate exchanges of cash for asset), forward/futures (pre-agreed-upon future exchanges of cash for asset), swaps (pre-agreed-upon sets of multiple future cash flow exchanges), and options (future exchanges of cash for asset contingent on an event or price level). These contracts are like Lego blocks continuously added together or taken apart by financial engineers to create new structured securities. The main valuation principle is simple: a whole is worth the sum of its parts.

Section I explains the structural building blocks outlined above and puts them in the context of financial engineering and investment strategy.

Section II is new and offers an overview of financial engineering landscape, from the general asset-backed trust structure to details of tranched mortgage securities, CDOs, exotic options and structured financial products people find offered to them

Capital Market Instruments

This book is a revised and updated guide to some of the most important issues in the capital markets today, with an emphasis on fixed-income instruments such as index-linked bonds, asset backed securities, mortgage backed securities and related products such as credit derivatives.