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To qulify for social security benefits you need to earn social security credits. You earn these credits over the years when you work in a job and pay social security taxes.

You will earn the credits based on the amount of your earnings for the year that you worked. Social Security Administration (SSA) will use your work history to determine your eligibility for retirement or disability benefits or your family’s eligibility for survivors benefits when you die.

In 2008, you receive one credit for each $1,050 of earnings, up to the maximum of four credits per year. You can receive more than four credits in given year, no matter how much earned after $4200 for year 2008.

Each year SSA adjusts the amount of earnings needed for credits goes up slightly as average earnings levels increase. The credits you earn remain on your Social Security record even if you change jobs or have no earnings for a while.

To get your social security benefits you must earn 40 credits if you born after 1929. That means you should be having atleast 10 years work experience with adequate social security elgible earnings.

You can combine several of your student or parent loans into a single student loan debt consolidation. You can consolidate your federal student loans too, but make sure that you do not consolidate both your federal student loans and private student loans into a single student loan debt consolidation program. Just as other debt consolidation loans, you must make your student loan debt consolidation payments to a single lender, who further disburses to your old creditors.

To go for debt consolidation of your student loans, your minimum balance should be $5,000, and you must either be in the six month grace period after your studies, or are already repaying your student loan.

Before selecting your student loan debt consolidation option, review all the advantages and the disadvantages:

• Through debt consolidation you make your student loan payments to a single lender.

• Depending on the balance of your loan amount, your consolidated student loan has an extended repayment term from 10 to 30 years.

• When negotiating with your bank or financial institutions, ensure that your phased repayment plan allows you to easily meet your monthly payments and have a good credit rating, at the same time.

• The rate of interest for student loan debt consolidation is capped at 8.25 percent for federal student loans.

• Once the rate is fixed you cannot take advantage if the interest rates fall in future.

• There are no fees charged for student loan debt consolidation.

• Once approved, you cannot undo your debt consolidation of your student loans as they have already repaid in full to your previous creditors, and they no longer exist.

You can still obtain debt consolidation for your over due, or unfulfilled, student loans if you negotiate a satisfactory repayment plan with your bank, or debt consolidation lender. Married couples, too, can consolidate their individual student loans together. This is regardless of how much each owns before consolidation, and must now agree to pay the consolidated amount.

Social security is calculated based on your income during the 35 years period in which you earned the most. Your earnings will be indexed to account for changes in the average wages since the year in which you earned the money. Then SSA(Social security administration) will use a predefined formula to calculate your basic benefit, or “Primary Insurance Amount”(PIA). If you don’t have earnings for 35 years, some years with no earnings will be used to determine the average amount.

Standard & Poor’s 500 index is a stock index that tracks 500 large cap stocks (mostly U.S Companies). The S&P is commonly used to measure the stock market performance.

Normal retirement age is the age you must reach to qualify for your full social secuirty benefits. This is also called as “full retirement age”. Your monthly benefit amount will be reduced if you start collecting benefits before reaching your full retirement age.

Market timing is an investment strategy that attempts to highlight when the stock market is on the verge of moving lower or higher.

There are some penalties if you withdraw money from your retirement savings plans before you reach the eligibility criteria. Withdrawls taken from most of the employer sponsored retirement savings plans taken before age 59 1/2. Ofcourse there are some exceptions  like hardship withdrawls and loans from 401(k) plans, that are fully repaid.

Most of the people will hold more than one debt. For example you may have high interest credit cards, loans and mortgages. So, to pay off one debt you may need to borrow from someone else, and eventually creating yet another debt. One of the solutions to this problem is debt consolidation loan. The concept of debt consolidation is quite simple technique. To consolidate all your debts, you would take out a single loan which helps you to pay off entire your liabilities, and then, you will just find one monthly payment plan to make and clear off your debt over the period. With the help of a financial expert you can lower down your monthly repayments by spreading them over a longer period of time.

With this approach, you would need to be a bit careful. Mostly,the debt consolidation loan is kind of loan is considered to be the last financial resort. So if you start spending money again, then you better consider it again, since you could find yourself in a serious trouble. Most of such loans do require you to be a homeowner. No matter at all, if you are a tenant, you too can take advantage of such money provision with the help of unsecured form of consolidation loan process. On the whole, usually secured for of borrowing I is done against a piece of your worth property. Such money provision happens to be cost-effective and you get it at lower rates. On the other hand, unsecured form of money provision is obtained without any sort of pledging placing. you secure the provision well after a small personal check of yours like your credit records, your employment-ability, and of course your current financial circumstances etc. sometimes it is said that it is necessary for the loan to be secured. The reason is each person who applies for a debt consolidation loan is classified a credit risk and has a track record of getting into debt. To make up for this risk, the money lender will ask for security to be placed against the loan. In the event, if you fail to make your loan payments on time, you may lose your security.

Applying for debt consolidation loan is getting easier day by day. Now, you can apply for such loan online at various institutions. You should first organise all of your pending bills and debts at one place. After try to contact a legitimate consolidation company. Furthermore, when you apply for consolidation service, you will be asked to describe the overall nature of your debt situation. Considering entire of the fact into account, the company provides you with the sum you need to repay your liabilities in full.

It would be a common question for people who are first time contributors to 401k and for people who are already contributing to their 401k retirement plan. withdrawing money from a 401k during the early stages of contribution is not wise decision, but there would be some circumastances you would need money desperately and need to withdraw money from your 401k account.

How to withdraw money from 401k ?

Most 401k retirement plans do not allow you to withdraw money, unless you are facing some kind of a financial hardship. This is why some 401k withdrawals are also known as “401k hardship withdrawals.” The common reasons such as death of a spouse (which is beyond human control) or a large medical bill are valid financial hardships.

Employers will set 401k withdrawal rules with guidelines set up by Internal Revenue Service. So, if you have an immediate need for cash wilth a valid reason, then you will be eligible to make 401k withdrawals. Some of the reasons that allow you to make 401k hardship withdrawals:

1. Large medical bills for you, your spouse or family
2. Buying a house (your primary residence) - this excludes the mortgage payments
3. Paying university and post-secondary school fees for your children, dependents, spouse, etc
4. To prevent foreclosure of your home

Important: If you take a 401k hardship withdrawal for any of these reasons mentioned above, you will not be allowed to make any annual 401k contributions for atleast 6 months following the withdrawal. So, you will be suspended from making 401k retirement contributions for the next 6 months period.

Rolling your 401k to roth IRA will result in a taxation at the current tax rate. Instead it would be beneficial if you convert your 401k to a traditional IRA.

If you wanted to roll your 401k to a roth ira the best route would be to convert the 401k into a traditional IRA and then you can convert from traditional IRA to a roth IRA.

You can approach to any fund managing companies to move your funds from a 401k to traditional IRA. For example T.Rowe Price, Fidelity, Vanguard etc.. offer a comprehensive support to transfer your funds to a Traditional IRA.