Property in Scotland is cheaper than the rest of the UK, according to ESPC.

David Marshall, a business analyst at the firm, said that the average house price in Scotland is generally lower than in other parts of the UK, and has been for years.

"Scotland has always been comparatively affordable compared to the rest of the UK, but that isn't uniform across the board. There are areas where average house prices in Scotland are much higher than the UK average," he added.

Mr Marshall's comments follow data from Lloyds TSB Scotland's latest Scottish House Price Monitor, which highlighted that the nation's housing market's recovery from the recession has currently paused.

On an annual underlying basis, house prices in Scotland have increased 0.8 per cent, however, in the three months to July 31st 2010, the quarterly price index for the average domestic property in Scotland fell 2.9 per cent on the previous quarter.

The average price of a Scottish property now stands at £159,217.
 

UK house prices fell during August, according to figures from Hometrack.

The property intelligence group's data highlights that the average house price dropped 0.3 per cent across the month to £158,300, following a 0.1 per cent decline in July.

August's drop has been attributed to a fall in the number of people looking for a new home.

Richard Donnell, director of research at Hometrack, said: "The unmistakable fact is that the availability of homes for sale has improved markedly and this has reduced the support for house prices provided by the scarcity of housing for sale over 2009 and early 2010. This comes at a time when there is growing weakness on the demand side - a weakness which represents more than just a seasonal blip."

However, recent research conducted by economists at Oxford Economics suggested that a shortage of new homes being built over the next few years will lead to house price growth, meaning people should act quickly if they want to invest in UK property.

The researchers stated that average residential prices will increase by 7.5 per cent this year.
 

The UK is proving increasingly popular with buy-to-let property investors, it has been claimed.

According to furniture solutions provider Fully Furnished, a growing number of overseas investors are looking at property in the UK, and London in particular, as confidence improves.

"Although still faced with its challenges, there is more confidence currently in the UK property market and demand for rental properties remains very strong. Recognising the increase in rents now being achieved, we are seeing more international investors than ever choosing to make an investment purchase in our capital city," the firm's managing director Alec Watt stated.

Last week, it was reported that house prices in London have fallen during August, wiping out gains made in the first half of the year.

According to the Rightmove real estate index, asking prices in the capital city fell 4.1 per cent to an average of £405,058, marking the biggest drop in two years.
 

Those considering investment in UK property may be interested to learn that prices are predicted to increase by four per cent during 2010.

The Centre for Economics and Business Research (CEBR) recently predicted the UK property market will see prices rise by four per cent this year in its Consumer and Housing Prospects report. It also stated this increase would continue to 2014 due to a shortage in available property.

Despite other forecasters predicting a "double dip" in the British housing market, CEBR, which works to provide businesses with economic solutions, is confident that short supply and high demand will enable prices to rise year-on-year to 2014.

Report author Benjamin Williamson said: "While we see a double?dip in house prices as being completely avoidable, this does not mean that we will see a return to dizzying house prices any time soon. Our forecasts show that house prices are unlikely to reach 2007 levels before 2013."
 

The number of properties for listed sale in the USA is continuing to increase, according to research.

People considering buying a home in the USA will be pleased to learn that Altos Research's report revealed house prices there are also remaining stable.

According to the company's composite price index, following a monthly USA price increase in May, asking prices for homes on the sales market stayed flat in June.

The report also found that an increasing number of USA homeowners are making the most of improving market conditions and putting their homes up for sale.

In June and during the first half of 2010, the number of homes on the USA property market rose.

Compared to the $470,017 (£303,236) average price recorded in January 2009, June's price data is better.

Altos Research is a resource for real-time real estate data which publishes statistics and analysis of real estate market.

Property in post-crash Turkey can offer a good investment opportunity, one expert has claimed.

Writing for the Global Property Guide blog, realtor Aydin Cakir said that Turkey never really became as popular as it could have been with property buyers, who looked to EU nations in the boom years, however, this is all set to change.

According to Mr Cakir, one real draw for people hoping to buy real estate in Mugla or invest in Antalya real estate listings, is the liquidity in the Turkish banking system which helps boost mortgage availability and affordability.

The fact that Turkey is in great fiscal condition, with gross domestic product rising 11.7 per cent year-on-year over the first quarter and the nation having a budget surplus of $5.1 billion in May this year, is also good news for property investors.

"With many countries in Europe having been downgraded, many facing a downgrade, and some even having been downgraded and facing being downgraded again, Turkey is standing out," he added.

Last week, Select Resorts stated that the Turkish property market has seen significant growth in the past two years and provides a real opportunity for investors.
 

Investors wanting to find a home in Murcia or elsewhere in Spain should take advantage of the bargains currently on offer, according to one commentator.

Writing for Helium, financial commentator Katerina Nikolas said that the Spanish property market is full of repossessed and distressed properties which can be picked up at a low price.

"Sales of distressed properties are on the rise and these represent good buys. Often the owners are stalling the banks from foreclosing and are prepared to sell at a loss rather than lose out completely. Many properties were purchased in the boom years and sit with negative equity which means that advertised prices by agents are probably open to much more downward negotiation," she added.

Ms Nikolas advised anyone looking for property in Spain to research the areas they are looking at well and avoid any black spots which have been subject to compulsory purchase orders or demolition threats.

Last month, Mark Stucklin, a real estate industry expert, told the New York Times that Spanish property prices are currently at their lowest level of the recession.
 

Popular overseas holiday destinations such as Benalmadena and Marbella on the Costa del Sol are once again finding favour with Brits.

According to Costa del Villa, the improving exchange rate, England's disappointing World Cup performance and the dismal summer weather have encouraged many people to abandon their staycation plans and head to somewhere sunny, which is good news for people renting out property on the Costa del Sol.

According to figures cited by the firm, Spain saw an 11 per cent increase in overnight guests in July this year compared with the same month in 2009.

This is an encouraging sign, as the number of UK residents going on holidays abroad had dipped last year due to financial worries.

Costa del Sol and other regions of Spain had their profile boosted earlier this year when first lady Michelle Obama and her daughters enjoyed a trip to the popular beach resort of Marbella.
 

Travel in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) has picked up, according to latest figures.

Investors with property in the UAE will be pleased to hear that recent figures from the Abu Dhabi Tourism Authority show the number of people visiting the Emirate jumped 16 per cent in July compared with the same month the previous year.

July was the ninth consecutive month of double digit guest growth for the Emirates.

For the first time, international market growth of 29 per cent outstripped domestic growth of four per cent.

Commenting on the findings, Nadine Hallak, a spokesperson for Cheapflights.co.uk, said that travel to the UAE had dropped during Dubai's recession, however, things are now picking up.

She added that high-profile events such as the launch of Formula One in Abu Dhabi and the fact that the recent Sex and the City film was set in the Emirate have boosted its profile with holidaymakers.

 

Emirates has boosted travel links between the UK and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) with the launch of its new route from Manchester to Dubai.

The superjumbo will fly between the two locations twice daily and has already broken the record for the most number of passengers to leave the site on a single flight when it took off on September 1st.

Improved travel links will be welcome news for people with property in the UAE.

"This is a historic moment for Emirates as we bring our 21st century superjumbo to the north-west, 20 years after our first flight from the region," explained executive vice-chairman Maurice Flanagan.

"Our Manchester service has been an incredible success story, and we're delighted to be opening the next chapter today."

Earlier this week, figures from Dubai International highlighted that the airport has been receiving a record number of passengers.

In July, some 4.3 million passengers were handled by the airport, compared with 3.7 in July 2009.
 

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.

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.