Donald Trump has said that his planned golf development near Aberdeen is still going ahead although Trump Entertainment Resorts, his casino company, has recently filed for bankruptcy. However, it will be at least 2013 before any housing in the Menie Estate resort is completed.

The Trump Organisation said that the coastal development near Aberdeen would be unaffected by the filing, reports The Financial Times. Trump's project director in Scotland, Neil Hobday, said that the Trump Organisation had "nothing to do" with the casino operation and was "in extremely good shape".

Trump was granted outline planning permission for the resort at the Menie Estate, which will create 950 holiday cottages in Scotland, last November. Alongside the holiday properties, the US tycoon plans to build two championship golf courses, a golf academy, 500 private family homes and 36 golf villas.

Hobday said that they hoped to finalise a detailed planning application for the resort this year and to have the final go ahead next spring. "If we are lucky enough to start digging dirt by this time next year, I would hope we would be playing golf by about the summer of 2012," he said. The cost of the scheme has been significantly reduced by the pound's weakness against the dollar, Hobday added.

There has been speculation that the global economic downturn could threaten the future of Trump's Scottish resort. "We all hope that in four years time the economic environment will have significantly improved," Hobday said.

The Trump Organisation has so far purchased the estate and will pay to develop the golf courses. However, according to Hobday, Trump will seek to bring in outside finance to help fund the construction of buildings.

This story was brought to you by holidaylettings.co.uk, the UK's No.1 for holiday homes worldwide.

UK’s IRS (Internal Revenue Service Board of Inland Revenue) has under special circumstances enabled extension on tax payment deadlines, aripaev.ee writes...

Despite gloomy economic predictions, a survey has found that nearly 13 million British people have booked or intend to book a holiday between Christmas and the end of February. According...

A hedge fund has begun offering investors the chance to have their investment denominated in gold, as worries grow over governments debasing their currencies by printing money...

The slump in the UK's residential property sector continued in January with prices falling by 1.3%, according to the latest figures published today...

French property is likely to be at the forefront of the minds of many investors this year, with foreign buyers looking to capitalise on the popularity of eurozone destinations.

According to a survey conducted by HomeAway.co.uk and Savills, there will be a resurgence in wealthy lifestyle buyers, purchasing property with cash.

Established markets such as France are likely to be the beneficiaries of the property buyers as many shy away from more risky markets in light of the economic climate.

Courtney Wylie, general manager at HomeAway Holiday-Rentals, commented: "Traditional holiday hotspots are among the top-performing destinations … with places like the Cote d'Azur, Malaga Province, the Balearics and the Algarve all being great options for reliable rental returns.

"For anyone hoping to rent, it is essential to research the tourist market first, particularly when considering emerging markets. Access to the destination should also be considered."

International Property Magazine recently placed France at the top of its Quality of Life Index for the fifth year in a row.

Portugal's property market is attracting an increasing amount of interest from potential investors, it has been claimed.

Overseas housing news website Property Community has reported that property portal Infinito Real has seen a 17 per cent month-on-month rise in the number of enquires about the country within the last quarter.

The website reports that this growth can be attributed to the fact the country is not overcrowded like some of its close competitors and also to its recent positive press coverage surrounding its economy.

Stephen Anderson, managing director of Infinito Real, told the news provider that a number of factors had contributed towards Portugal's growing popularity.

He continued: "We have seen that a number of buyers who postponed their plans in 2009 are now ready to move which has created a backlog of buyers wanting to move as soon as possible.

"The small increase in the exchange rate from almost £1 to €1 throughout most of 2009 … has had a profound effect."

Earlier this year, the European Commission predicted that Portugal's economy would fare better in 2010 than previously expected, potentially growing by 0.3 per cent.

Thailand's housing market is unlikely to be affected by the government's decision not to renew its property tax breaks, it has been claimed.

According to a report by Overseas Property Professional (OPP), property developer CB Richard Ellis is confident that the removal of the incentive is not going to affect international sales within the country.

The developer believes that the housing market is now strong enough to stand alone without needing to attract investors.

CB Richard Ellis's executive director for Thailand, James Pitchon, explained to OPP that the incentives did not include projects due to be finished after March 2010.

He continued: "In the Bangkok market, Thai buyers dominate the market and the removal of incentives will have little affect on foreign demand because it is already limited.

"In the resort markets, many projects are sold on a leasehold basis and leasehold sales did not benefit from tax incentives so again we see little impact on foreign demand from the removal of incentives."

Some developers within the country have claimed that the tax rises could result in a reduction in profits.

The International Valuation Standards Council recently introduced new guidelines aimed at making Thailand's property market more transparent.

Now is the time for property investors to take advantage of low prices in the Spanish rental property market, it has been suggested.

According to Savills Select Resorts, an increasing number of luxury properties in the country are being purchased by investors capitalising of discounted homes in the favoured destination.

Savills are quick to point out that many developers are offering attractive financing options to tempt buyers back to the market.

They say: "Exquisite Spanish homes that were unaffordable less than a year ago are now being snapped up by canny investors and lifestyle buyers taking advantage of the lower prices and massive reductions being offered by developers."

Among the more popular destinations are new developments in Marbella on the Costa del Sol.

The La Floresta de la Mairena is the first new project in the region for three years, something that Savills says reflects the increasing demand now being seen in the market.

Furthermore, the National Association of Estate Agents International recently recommended that buyers invest early in the country to take advantage of bargain properties.

The Thai property market is bracing itself for price increases at the end of March after government officials decided that they would not be renewing tax breaks.

According to a report on Property Wire, the decision was made after news that the country's economy was in recovery and many developers are now running at a profit was released.

Incentives including reductions in property transfer fees and lower mortgage registration costs have helped to boost sales in 2009 by as much as seven per cent.

It will mean that the current transfer tax - set at 0.01 per cent - will rise to two per cent while mortgage registration fees will increase from 0.01 per cent to one per cent.

The news may be of interest to individuals looking to purchase property in the Asian country, who will have to move quickly to take advantage of the reduced costs.

Land & Houses, the country's largest developer, explained that the changes would result in single figure, rather than double figure growth for the coming year.

The International Valuation Standards Council recently introduced guidelines that will make the Thai property market more transparent.

Prices for property in Goa continue to rise with increasing demand for prime land and properties in this party zone. Developers and construction companies are outbidding each other to acquire the most prime real estate pieces in Goa, and this trend is set to continue into the near future.

The Spanish property crash continues unabated and it is now getting to the point where the massive – and we do mean massive – amount of repossessed property in Spain is in danger of bringing the country to it’s knees. Despite the quiet injection of 60 billion Euros by the European Central Bank in to the Spanish property market by way of covered bond purchases in May, 2009 – we have now reached the point of no return we feel.

More on Repossessions in Spain – Are There Any Estate Agents Left in Spain

Essex Property Trust, Inc. (NYSE: ESS), a fully integrated Real Estate Investment Trust (REIT) that invests in apartment communities located in highly desirable, supply-constrained markets, announced today that the Company has entered into a venture to acquire Essex Skyline at MacArthur Place, a 349-unit high rise condominium project in Santa Ana, California for $128 million.

More on REIT Buys Interest in Luxury Orange County Condo Project

The tentative recovery of Lanzarote´s tourist industry continues.  As figures just released by ISTAC, the Canary Island´s Institute of Statistics, reveals that foreign visitor arrivals rose by 3.28% in Janauary.  Suggesting that the record falls and negative numbers of last year are now a thing of the past.

More on Tourist Arrivals Rise 3.28% On Lanzarote

Post Properties, Inc, an Atlanta-based real estate investment trust, today announced quarterly dividends on its common stock of $0.20 per share for the first quarter of 2010. The dividend is payable on April 15, 2010 to all common stock shareholders of record as of March 31, 2010.

More on Post Properties REIT Announces Quaterly Dividends

After an interesting year in the property market, early 2010 is a crucial time for investors to examine their property portfolios and examine where the best yields are to be found. This is all the more important if one considers the growth in sale prices which overtook the growth in lettings values and the subsequent yield contraction of 55 basis points. The average property acquisition yielded 4.7% gross at the end of 2009.

More on Strongest Investment Property Yields Found in Commuter Areas

More than 250 of the top business leaders in commercial real estate met last week to hear the Voit Real Estate Services’ Commercial Real Estate Forecast at the Pacific Club. The top-notch panel included keynote speaker Dr. Christopher Thornberg of Beacon Economics, residential guru John McMonigle of the McMonigle Group, Robert D. Voit, president of Voit Real Estate Services, and Ken Gaitan, head of Bank of America’s OREO West.

More on COMMERCIAL AND RESIDENTIAL REAL ESTATE FORECAST DRAWS HUGE CROWD

It appears the British Government Inc has managed to eke out another 0.1% increase in average sale prices in the UK at the expense of sales volumes. According to the Land Registry, average sales prices have now risen 0.1% to £161,764, bringing the yearly increase up 2.5%

More on Property prices in the UK still distorted by low sales volumes

Ouch! It appears the church of England is – once again – better at preaching morals than actually practicing  them. A £40 million investment in a decidedly-dodgy Manhattan luxury real estate deal has just gone up to heaven to be with Jesus. According to the Episcopal  News Service:

More on Church of England Investment in Manhattan Goes South

Although the Burj Dubai is now “finished,” we still have not seen an influx of tenants or investors, but this rather entertaining video of the windows being cleaned makes up wonder what is going on. Surely this is not a practical solution. Or is it? With labor being cheap and readily available. Not a job we would fancy though. Scary…..

More on Burj Dubai Window Cleaning

After the post concerning Greek Property investment in Sparta, we continue our look at property investment hotspots in the Peloponnese with a hop over the Taygetos Mountains, into Messinia. This corner of the Peloponnese is opening up, as transport and communications improve, and foreign buyers are increasingly looking at property investment in Methoni.

More on Property Investment in Methoni

Robert Kiyosaki mentioned in his book “Rich Dad, Poor Dad” that assets put money into your pocket while liabilities take money out of your pocket.

It was with this in mind that I started to acquire more of these assets (e.g. stocks) instead of frivolous stuff like clothes, accessories, electronic devices and stuff.

These stocks I own have been paying me quarterly and yearly dividends. Thus, they have been putting money into my pocket over the years.

However, two stocks that I have recently declared “rights’ issue. For the uninitiated, that basically means that the company is issuing me with more shares and I have to pay for them if I intend to exercise my “rights” or either forfeit them and see my shareholdings in the company diluted.

What an irony. These assets are now taking money out of my pocket! All the dividends that I have earned from them are like useless.

If they are so cash strapped, why did they even declare dividends in the first place over the years?

Didn’t they foresee this coming? Why weren’t they more prudent in calculating the amount of dividends that they were giving out over the years?

So now instead of owning assets, I am like owning two businesses which are asking me to pump in more money into them. I can’t tell whether these are assets or liabilities just yet.

*Big Sigh*

It’s a late weekday afternoon and best-selling author Sharon Lechter is once again giving financial advice.

Today, her target audience is quite different from the adults who purchased the “Rich Dad Poor Dad” books she co-authored with fellow Valley resident Robert Kiyosaki.

This group consists of a half-dozen young teenagers at a Phoenix branch of the Boys & Girls Clubs, and the audience is one Lechter hopes to appeal to with YOUTHpreneur, part of her new business that teaches children how to be entrepreneurs.

“I have a passion for financial literacy for families and children,” said Lechter, who left the Rich Dad Company in 2007 after disagreements with Kiyosaki and now runs Pay Your Family First. “What is happening with today’s kids is they don’t understand delayed gratification. . . . Kids want it before they even think about working for it.”

Lechter’s focus on children comes at a time when national studies show high-school and college students are plunging themselves into deep credit-card debt and having easier access to credit. Meanwhile, President Barack Obama last week threw his support behind a consumer-friendly credit-card law that eliminates tricky fine print, sudden rate increases and late fees.

The YOUTHpreneur program teaches children how to make money through gumball sales, and she’s teamed with local branches of the Boys & Girls Clubs and Fry’s Food Stores. Through the program, children learn about sales and profits by operating a candy machine at a Fry’s store.

“It was a good experience. We learned about business,” said Michael Clark, a 14-year-old from Greenway Middle School in Phoenix. “We had fun doing it, and we made some money for the Boys & Girls Club. So, it was all good.”

Lechter, of Paradise Valley, has taught the YOUTHpreneur program to about 70 children at six different Boys & Girls Clubs branches during the past year, and she’s selling the program on her Web site, youthpreneur.net.

She said working with kids brought her career full circle as the certified public accountant began focusing on financial education when her oldest son, Phillip, went off to college.

She said she thought she had taught her son to manage money, but as a freshman at Arizona State University, he quickly dug himself into a $2,500 credit-card debt.

“I was so upset, but I was more angry at myself than him,” Lechter said. “We didn’t bail him out. It took him about five years to get himself on track.”

The lesson apparently stuck because Phillip Lechter now is president of her new company, and he said the business would focus on entrepreneurship, financial education and money tips for teens and parents.

Sharon Lechter said it’s important for parents to teach their kids about financial management because college students are racking up thousands of dollars of credit-card debt and even some high-school students are using credit cards.

Sallie Mae Inc., which manages student loans, released a study this month that said nearly one-third of college students put tuition on their credit cards and the average balance for a student was $3,173.

College seniors are graduating with an average credit-card debt of $4,100, up from about $2,900 in 2004, according to the study. The median credit-card debt for freshmen nearly tripled to $939 since 2004.

Meanwhile, a 2008 nationwide survey of high-school students by Jump$tart, a financial literacy organization, found that nearly 35 percent of students had a credit card, up slightly from the nearly 32 percent in 2002.

Steve Beekman, area director for the Boys & Girls Clubs of Metropolitan Phoenix, said Lechter provided important skills to the children. He said a donor provided the gumballs and machines, while the children, who were between 11 and 15, donated the few hundred dollars in profits back to the Boys & Girls Clubs.

“It has gotten them exposed on how to run a business, and it has opened their eyes to the real world in how to make money and not go out and spend it all,” Beekman said.

Along with running YOUTHpreneur, Lechter also has co-authored “Three Feet From Gold,” which interviews successful entrepreneurs like the founders of Chick-fil-A restaurant and Mrs. Fields Cookies.

She said the book, a partnership with the Napoleon Hill Foundation, is scheduled to be released in October.

Have you heard? The government is giving away free money! It’s all part of the Obama stimulus package. These government grants can be used for anything: buy a car, purchase a home, start a business or pay your credit card bills. Even take a vacation. And here’s the best part – because this is a grant, you never have to repay the money.

How do I know this? It’s all over the web. Just search “stimulus” or “government grants” and see what comes up. You’ll find site after site that promises to show you how to get your share of the “billions of dollars which go unclaimed each year.”

Con artists are creating phony web sites with names like PresidentObamaGrants.com and FederalGovernmentGrantSolutions.com. “They’re advertising them on search engines like Google and on social networking sites like Facebook. They’re also promoting them in chat rooms,” says Susan Grant, director of consumer protection at the Consumer Federation of America.

The scammers even create bogus blogs, to tout and drive traffic to their sites. I clicked on OfficialStimulusPayments.com which took me to “Jessica’s Money Blog.” Jessica, who does not give her last name, wants everyone to know how she got a $12,000 check from the government to start her own $5,000 a month business. She claims she learned how to get this free money from a site called GrantsForYou.com and she urges readers to get their share of the loot.

“Don’t fall for it,” warns Eileen Harrington, acting director of the Federal Trade Commission’s Bureau of Consumer Protection. “There is no money in the stimulus package to send out individual checks to people.”

The Grant University gets a failing grade
The Better Business Bureau has received hundreds of complaints from people across the country who took the bait. Instead of a grant, these victims got unexpected charges on their credit or debit card accounts.

In the past year, about 350 people complained to the BBB about a web site called The Grant University run by a company located in Draper, Utah. Tracie Oberlies is one of them. “I think they’re scam artists,” she says.

Oberlies wanted to buy a small farm in her hometown of Lugoff, S.C. She hoped the Grant University would help her get the money. The web site offers a 7-day trial membership for just $1.98. It gives you access to the company’s site plus a disc called “The Grant Professor.” Oberlies was unable to log on to the site, even when her disc arrived – 11 days after her order.

She called the company to cancel “and they kept giving me the runaround.” They told her it was too late to cancel and they would not refund the first month’s membership fee of $69.95 they had billed to her credit card.

In her complaint to the BBB Oberlies writes, “I have contacted them a minimum of ten different occasions and they continuously hang up on me and refuse to allow me to speak with a supervisor.” Eventually Oberlies got her money back, but only after she told the company she was going to go to the news media with her story.

The BBB gives The Grant University an “F” rating, its lowest grade. Jane Driggs, president of the BBB in Salt Lake City tells me that rating is based on the volume of complaints and the failure to resolve many of them.

“They are preying on people who really think they are going to get the free money,” Driggs says. “And there is no free money.”

Just the tip of the iceberg
A company in Las Vegas called The Grant Instructor has generated even more complaints – 450 so far. The BBB says the company, which also has an “F” grade, runs at least two dozen sites with names such as: American Grant Club, Get My Grant, Grant Dollars, Grants Are Easy, Grant Resource Center and Your American Grant.

Christopher Gaffer of Mankato, Minn. stumbled onto one of their sites called “The Grant Search.” Gaffer is on the board of a non-profit group in Mankato that helps provide affordable housing. Part of their funding comes from grants. Gaffer went online to look for new funding opportunities.

The initial cost was just $1.95 for seven days access to the Grant Search database. Gaffer paid but never got his access code. Seven days later, he found a charge for $49.50 on his credit card for “a recurring monthly membership.” Gaffer tried to contact the company but could not find a phone number or e-mail address. “It was a nightmare,” he says.

After complaining to the BBB and waiting a long time, Gaffer got a partial refund of $24.50. “It’s a scam,” he says. And he wants others to learn from his mistake.

I contacted both The Grant University and The Grant Search and did not receive a response to my request for a comment.

The bottom line
The Federal government does give out billions of dollars in grant money every year. Most of these grants either help students pay for college or are for clearly defined reasons, such as research or charitable work.

No one has to pay to get a list of government grants or to apply for one. More importantly, no company can “guarantee” you’ll receive grant money. You’ll find all the information you need at free government web sites, such as: http://www.grants.gov/, http://www.studentaid.ed.gov/, http://www.govbenefits.gov/ and http://www.sba.gov/.

One more warning: Some grant scams come in the form of an e-mail offering you the chance to get free money. These are phishing scams sent by identity thieves who hope to steal your personal information. NEVER respond to one of these emails.

by Carolyn Bigda and Paul J. Lim

In a world turned upside down, you must re-examine some basic assumptions. A good place to start: understanding the true nature of risk.

Rule No. 1: Risk

Old thinking: If you can stomach the ups and downs that come with risk, you’ll be rewarded.

New rule: Risk isn’t about your stomach. It’s about making or missing an important goal.

You know you have to consider risk. But what is risk? Many of us have learned to think of risk as synonymous with volatility. For years, what came down reliably bounced back even higher. You could easily conclude that risk tolerance was just a matter of taste. As long as you had the fortitude to see the occasional loss on your 401(k) statement and not panic, you would capture superior returns over time.

What to do: You shouldn’t run from risky investments just because they lost money - that train has left the station. But the old buy-on-the-dips advice isn’t quite right either. This bear market’s lesson is that how much risk you can take is a matter of how much you can lose and still meet your basic goals. That may mean scaling back on stocks, even if you miss some of the next market rebound.

Rule No. 2: Cash

Old thinking: Keep enough money in ultrasafe accounts to cover life’s emergencies, but no more.

New rule: Relying more on cash can rescue you in an “asset emergency.”

For most of your career you’ll want to set aside about six months’ worth of living expenses in the bank. That money covers the mortgage and puts food on the table should you lose your job. The fact that you’ll earn only about 2% is beside the point. You can’t take the risk.

The simultaneous crash in stocks and houses has taught us that we need to redefine “emergency.”Rande Spiegelman, vice president of financial planning for the Schwab Center for Financial Research, recommends looking at the next one to three years and adding up any big-ticket stuff you see coming: tuition, a wedding, a down payment on a house. Once you have your total, aim to hold that much in a cash account or a low-risk investment such as a high-quality short-term bond fund.

What to do: It’s not easy to build cash savings and a retirement fund at the same time. If you have to make choices, build up that emergency fund first because you can’t expect to lean on your home equity or stocks if you lose your job. And see if you have some flexibility on the big-ticket obligations. Maybe you plan for a state school rather than a private college, or downsize the wedding. If all your assets are in a 401(k), move some of that balance to low-risk investment options as you build your cash funds. That will preserve more to tap via a 401(k) loan in a pinch. Not a terrific option, but it can beat the alternatives.
In the years just before and after retirement, cash becomes even more important. You don’t want to sell stocks during a bear market to buy groceries. Aim for two to four years’ worth of living expenses in low-risk assets as you near retirement.

Rule No. 3: Human capital

Old thinking: The longer your time horizon, the more stocks you should own.

New rule: Time isn’t everything. You must also consider your earnings potential.

It’s one of the basic rules of thumb: The more years you have to recoup losses, the more aggressive you can be. Unfortunately, the math isn’t so clear-cut.

Here’s a better way to think about how aggressive your portfolio should be: Imagine that it includes not only stocks and bonds but also your human capital, meaning your ability to earn income by working. The safer it is, the more chances you can afford to take with your other assets - that is, your portfolio.

This doesn’t mean that time no longer matters. As you age, the value of your human capital declines, and you’ll need to secure more of your savings. So the conventional advice to hold a lot in stocks when you are young and gradually trim back can still make sense.

But not for everyone. The nature of your career may make your human capital more bond-like or more stock-like, says finance professor Moshe Milevsky of York University in Toronto. Tenured professors like Milevsky have human capital that resembles a triple-A-rated bond, especially when they have a solid pension plan. Those lucky souls can dive aggressively into stocks and even stay there as they approach retirement, he says. The human capital of a commission-based mortgage broker, on the other hand, is pretty clearly a stock - and it’s not a blue chip. That person should own a fair amount of bonds, even when young.

What to do: Assess your human capital. A typical worker’s income is about 70% like a bond and 30% like a stock, says Thomas Idzorek, chief investment officer for Ibbotson Associates. Use that as your baseline and then think about how long you’ll be working, the stability of your current job, and your ability to change careers if you have to. You’ve probably realized in the past few months that your human capital is not as secure as you once thought. If you’ve been an aggressive investor, that alone may be a reason to shift more of your assets to safer ground.

Rule No. 4: Borrowing

Old thinking: Borrowing sensibly is a good way to build wealth.

New rule: Borrow cautiously. You have to worry about the other guy’s debt too.

The quarter-century leading up to 2007 wasn’t simply a golden age for stocks. It was also a bull market for leverage. (That’s Wall Streetspeak for debt.) Since 1982, mortgage rates have fallen from 16% to below 6%. The levy on college loans dropped to around 3%. Americans responded to easy credit in a predictable way. The personal savings rate fell from over 12% to zilch, and household debt payments as a percentage of disposable income rose by a third as families “put it on the card” and paid for lavish kitchen upgrades with home-equity loans.

Looking back, America’s borrowing binge was nuts. Families were leaning on housing wealth, and that wealth was shaky.

The obvious moral here is to be conservative. There are always good reasons to borrow, even today. You need a mortgage to buy a house, and a college education provides enough of a lifetime payoff to justify a loan. But you ought to stretch less.

There’s a subtler lesson too. David Ellison, president of the FBR Funds, says that you have more exposure to leverage than you think, especially now that everyone is trying to unload debt. Perhaps your employer borrowed a lot over the past decade and now needs to conserve cash, so it’s laying off staff. Suddenly that HELOC you could easily handle on your salary doesn’t look like such a super idea. You can’t lean on your investments for help, because many of the companies you owned used leverage to pump up profits, and now they can’t borrow, so their earnings and stock prices are falling. And it’s harder to shore up your own balance sheet by selling your house when banks are reining in lending and potential buyers are scared to borrow for an asset that may decline further.

What to do: Be conservative about debt? Make that very conservative. Especially when your neighbors aren’t. Get a mortgage you can afford for the life of the loan, and put at least 20% down.

Rule No. 5: Housing

Old thinking: You can expect your house to appreciate handsomely over the long run.

New rule: Your home won’t make you rich. But it is an important savings tool.

If you live on one of the coasts, you probably guessed sometime around 2005 that home prices couldn’t keep rising the way they were. But the severity of the crash was still a shock: You heard a lot about how the market would have to “cool off” or “get back to normal” - the implication being that slow but steady appreciation was the future.

But the long-run data always told a different story. Yale University economist Robert Shiller looked closely in 2005 at the history of home prices since 1890, using a database he constructed. What he found was surprising. Except for two spectacular booms - the first after World War II and the second starting in 1998 - real estate appreciation has been unimpressive after figuring in inflation. As Shiller wrote in “Irrational Exuberance,” technology has allowed builders to nail up more houses faster, ensuring that supply never gets too far behind demand (and often gets ahead of it).

Even when prices are rising, gains on real estate aren’t as dazzling as they look, once you account for expenses. Maintenance costs typically run at about 1% of a home’s value annually, in addition to insurance and taxes. If you remodel, the most you can expect to recoup is about 80%. You have to pay steep fees when you buy (up to 3% in closing costs) and sell (up to 6% for realtor fees).

What to do: This doesn’t mean you have to rent, just that you should have modest expectations for your house as a wealth builder. There are still financial pluses. First, owning a house gives you a hedge against rising values in your own community so that you don’t risk being priced out as rents go up. (Ask a New Yorker about that.) Second, a traditional 30-year mortgage acts as what economists call a “commitment device,” or a tool that forces you to save. Instead of writing a check to a landlord, you gradually pay off principal. At the end, you own a house. Aside from your 401(k), no other asset enforces such discipline.

Rule No. 6: Diversification

Old thinking: A diversified portfolio lowers your risk.

New rule: Diversification won’t always save you - and you need more of it than you think.

Diversification hasn’t stopped you from getting hurt in this downturn. Both U.S. and foreign stocks are deep in the red. Holding bonds did cushion your losses, but most kinds of bonds still declined. What happened?

Jeremy Grantham, chief investment strategist at GMO, observed back in 2007 that we had a bubble not just in one or two kinds of assets, but in risk. Investors around the world were so confident, and so hungry for even a little extra return, that they were throwing money at anything that might deliver. Now that the risk bubble has burst, all those investors want now is the safety of U.S. Treasuries. So everything has moved roughly in sync, both up and down, for a few years.

Bear in mind, though, that these times are, to say the least, unusual. Over a longer period - as little as a decade - diversification still looks effective. While large U.S. stocks are down the past 10 years, U.S. corporate bonds earned 4.6% a year for the same period.

But in a global economy where money moves quickly, you have to work harder at diversification than before.

What to do: To ensure you are diversified, you don’t have to go out and buy 16 new mutual funds. First, look under the hood of the funds you have to see if you already own some of those assets. An easy way to do so is to plug your holdings into Morningstar.com’s Instant X-Ray tool. And buy funds that kill two birds with one stone. The T. Rowe Price International Bond fund, for example, invests up to 20% of its assets in emerging markets and the rest in developed countries. Put that together with a high-yield fund and a broad U.S. bond fund, and you’ll own most of the bond universe.

Rule No. 7: Retirement

Old thinking: Retiring early is a prize.

New rule: Retiring early is a problem.

Ever since Uncle Sam set 65 as the age you could retire and collect full Social Security benefits (it’s 66 or 67 for boomers today), workers have been trying to beat that bogey by quitting early. And that seemed well within reach earlier in this decade after a bull market that gave workers confidence that their money could work for them rather than the other way around.

But the reality of early retirement, even before the stock market’s sickening plunge, was never quite that rosy. More than half of early retirees leave work before they intended, and of those, nine in 10 depart because they get sick or are downsized.

And now the financial prospects for those who had a shot at a secure early retirement have dimmed: Long-tenured workers nearing retirement have seen their 401(k) accounts shrink an average of 30% over the past 14 months, according to EBRI. There’s no way around it: The numbers require you to rethink your plans.

What to do: “By delaying retirement just one year you could increase your annual retirement income by 9%,” says Richard Johnson, senior fellow at the Urban Institute. If you can hang on to your current high-paying post, great. The reality, of course, is that in an era of harsh cost cutting, well-paid older workers are more vulnerable. And you might not want to stick it out any longer anyway if the severance is decent. But there’s much to be gained from finding another job, even if it’s a lower-paid or part-time position. If you can earn enough to avoid collecting Social Security benefits early or dipping into your retirement accounts, research by T. Rowe Price shows, you’ll barely feel a hit to your income when you do retire. If your new job comes with health benefits, so much the better. The average health-care tab for an early retiree before he is eligible for Medicare runs to $8,500 a year, says an AARP study.

Despite all those benefits, if you are still many years away from the retire-or-work decision, you should think of working longer as Plan B. As we noted, you won’t have complete control over your ability to work - your health or the job market could make it difficult. That means you can’t afford to assume that you’ll just work a few more years if things go wrong. You will still have to stick to rules 1 through 6.

The property foreclosure crisis in the US has spread to California’s famous wine producing Napa Valley as falling land values and a shift to cheaper brands hits the industry hard.

Private property landlords in the UK are upbeat about the rental sector and more confident than they were a month ago about the outlook for 2010

The overseas second home market in 2010 is likely to be characterised by cash rich, lifestyle property investors who will take advantage of lower prices in traditional holiday hotspots, according to a new report.

Supply is outstripping demand in the UK property market in the first sustained shift in the sector for two years, according to a new report.

Property sales in Cyprus are starting to pick up but are still very slow, according to the latest figures published by the island’s Lands and Surveys Department.