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*

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.

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.

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.

In order to actually turn a good idea into money in your bank account, however, you have to know a little something about how the magic works. It is a good idea, for instance, to take apart this term “real estate.” Just what is real estate, and what are the types of real estate investing that are open to you?

“Real estate” is a term that refers to a piece of land and everything that sits on it, usually meaning structures. In terms of investment, its value is affected by local market conditions more than global conditions. There are several different ways to invest in real estate.

Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs) allow you to make money by investing in real estate, either by owning the properties themselves or by owning the mortgages on them, or to do a combination of both. The benefits of this type of investing are high yields and tax considerations. This is also a highly liquid type of investing, which means that it is easily converted to cash.

In a real estate partnership, you are pairing with (who or what?) in order to make money from existing structures or to build new ones. You can even make money off the sheer appreciation of undeveloped land itself. This is a good bet because of high growth potential and tax benefits (shelter).

The rental of vacation property is pretty self-explanatory. Your vacation property is one that is used for recreational purposes and is not your primary residence. (Define primary residence.)

Rental property is another almost self-explanatory concept, as we have all done business with landlords at some point in our lives. However, there may be a difference between residential and business rental property.

You may also invest in raw, or undeveloped, land.

It is a good idea to learn about each type of real estate investment to determine which yields the greatest benefits, determined by your particular needs. Kiyosaki named tax benefits as a good reason to become a real estate investor. After all, money you keep in your pocket is just as good as money earned.

If you are particularly interested in pursuing real estate investment because of tax benefits, you may even wish to become a real estate professional, as the IRS allows people who spend at least 750 hours a year to have nearly unlimited tax deductions. If you are not considered a professional, and your salary is high, that can actually cost you deductions on your real estate. You must have the time to participate in your real estate activities yourself, even if you have hired another real estate professional, to qualify for all tax benefits.

It’s a challenge for adults to create a financial Web site for kids that offers age-appropriate information and is entertaining enough to hold their attention. To mark National Financial Literacy Month, I’d like to mention a few that are worth a look.

For elementary-age kids. Meet the “Centsables” (www.centsables.com). They’re six super-hero friends — named, fittingly, Franklin, Jackson, Grant, Hamilton, Penny and Suzie B. — who live in Centsinnati and can “grow to gargantuan height, run like the wind, and control the elements.” And they do it all in the service of giving kids super money-management skills. Mark DiPippa, president of Norm Hill Entertainment and creator of the project, has ambitious plans to produce it as an animated TV series.

For now, kids can enjoy the Centsables online in a series of games and comic books. The target audience — children ages 6 to 11 — can probably handle the activity pages and comic books on their own. Younger children may need a hand from parents to navigate the lessons, which include “How kids earn money” and “Taking stock of the market.”

For middle- and high-school students. CareerForward is a free, innovative online program developed by the Michigan Department of Education, Michigan Virtual University and Microsoft’s Partners in Learning unit.

The curriculum is designed to take about 20 hours to complete and may be directed by a teacher (Michigan requires all students to have at least one online learning experience before they graduate), a volunteer or an interested parent.

CareerForward isn’t focused exclusively on financial education. But there’s a unit on managing money, including lessons in budgeting and a salary calculator for future jobs.

What I like about the program is that it gets kids thinking about what they’d like to do beyond high school — the education and skills they’ll need to earn a living in the global workplace. And that, after all, will determine how much money they’ll have to manage and what their standard of living will be.

For college students. Though not an interactive Web site per se, the “Playbook for Life” guide may be downloaded or ordered at www.playbook.thehartford.com. Originally developed by The Hartford insurance company in conjunction with the NCAA, the idea was to educate student athletes about the importance of financial planning.

But the lessons are equally valuable for all college students and young adults, with sections on purchasing a house, buying (and maintaining) a car, saving for retirement, buying insurance and paying taxes.

And when your kids are ready to go out on their own, there’s a lot of useful information at Kiplinger.com in the Starting Out section.

Financial institutions have a vested interest in supporting or providing financial literacy programs. Rrlative to cost, financial literacy provides both immediate and long-term returns. The most obvious is brand recognition and market share. Financial literacy offers an excellent opportunity to personalize ones institution among consumers who have myriad options in selecting financial service providers. Consumers who understand the merits of responsibly managing their financial resources are more likely to effectively and profitably utilize the services of a traditional financial institution.

Financial literacy is a good way to teach consumers about the benefits of having a relationship with a financial institution. Among these are economical access to funds and credit, the ability to establish a positive financial history, consumer protection and perhaps most important, a higher propensity towards savings, which increases net worth. Financial literacy can also break the cycle of poverty, which is often associated with the unbanked. Individuals who have experience handling a bank account and an awareness of other effective money management/asset building techniques are more likely to pass these on to their children.

Providing financial literacy training is not a one-size-fits-all effort . Financial literacy is most clearly divided into four categories: early intervention, basic literacy, credit rehabilitation and long-term planning or asset building.

Introduction at the earliest stage can often eliminate the need for corrective intervention at later stages. Given the breadth and variety of materials available, it may be useful to first determine your institution’s purpose and objectives for undertaking financial literacy training. This will assist you in specifying the audience you would like to reach and in identifying the most appropriate materials.

Download Guide to Financial Literacy Resources

PDF format, 526KB, 32Pages.

There’s no question my wife, Amy, and I will give her the funds; she raised me and is, by and large, the woman I consider my mom. She has always been kind to Amy. If we have the discretionary cash that can make my grandmother’s life happy, shouldn’t we hand it over?

Yet the request has caused us a lot of angst.

Part of our concern is where this will lead. Although my grandmother isn’t asking for a lot of money — just a few hundred dollars — when you open your wallet to family members, the first time is rarely the last. We don’t want to get in the position of becoming my grandmother’s ATM.

But it’s more than that. Amy and I have worked hard to earn this money, and it’s frustrating to have somebody want to tap into our account. What’s more, my grandmother will no doubt use the money for things that we’d never buy ourselves. We don’t want to feel like suckers for funding a lifestyle that we might consider indulgent.

So that leads us to the question we’ve been grappling with: When providing financial assistance to a family member, is it fair to say the money comes with constraints on how it is spent? Or, is financial assistance an exercise in unconditional love?

* * *

Let me say it at the outset: I don’t believe children bear an obligation to their parents as a cost of having been raised by those parents. Bringing a child into the world is a parent’s choice, not the child’s. Thus, the obligations that do exist run from parent to child, not in reverse.

That said, I certainly feel a desire to assist my grandmother out of a sense of love and caring. She also has always been careful with money — in terms of both spending and saving. And she and my grandfather obviously weren’t my birth parents, but they did choose to raise me.

Still, loving and understanding don’t necessarily erase the questions that inevitably arise when family members seek funding. In particular: Why do you need this money? And how are you spending the money you do have?

If you, the giver, don’t agree with how the person spends his or her money, do you have a right to impose your restrictions? Do you have a right to tell someone to change his or her spending habits in order to get any money from you?

One of my longtime friends, who’s providing financial support for her two sisters, says no.

She’s helping one sister pay off thousands of dollars of credit-card debt. “I’ve talked to her about managing her money,” my friend says, “and the need to stop relying on credit, but I would never tell her how to spend her money.”

With the other sister, my friend is paying more than $200 a month for cable and Internet access, cellphone charges and a cleaning service. She’s also considering sending her a few hundred dollars each month for spending money, again with no stipulations about how the cash is spent.

In both cases, my friend says that the offerings are acts of love, and that while she may not necessarily agree with how the money is ultimately spent, each sister “obviously has different spending priorities.” Moreover, she adds, using that money to shop, go to lunch or spend on a friend “are really positive things in a personal life, and I would never deny my sisters that just because their choices may not mirror my own spending priorities.”

“Giving money,” she concludes, “doesn’t give me the right to impose my views on how it’s spent.”

* * *

I admit that I am not as reflexively selfless as my friend. When my grandmother asked for money, I immediately started thinking about her spending that I consider wasteful. She regularly pays for brunch for herself and friends, and frequently hosts parties for friends. If she didn’t do these things, I thought, she wouldn’t need my money. And while I don’t mind paying for my grandmother’s brunch, I don’t particularly want to treat her friends.

But as I talked to a friend about it, I realized that a grandson’s idea of waste is a grandmother’s idea of pleasure. Who am I to consider her parties wasteful, any more than somebody else might consider my dining out or trips to a casino wasteful? Unless the spending is egregious, it seems unfair to impose my standards on someone else’s life.

On top of that, giving her the money with the stipulation that she only use it on herself would rob her of a big piece of her happiness. And what’s the point of giving her money if it only reminds her of what she cannot do?

So, after much thought, here’s where I am: I can’t deny that the dollars I will give to my grandmother will be tossed away on expenses that will make me cringe. I can’t deny that if the money requests continue, things might change.

But for the moment, at least, my grandmother’s happiness wins out. I will give her the money and say nothing.

Jeff Opdyke covers personal finance for The Wall Street Journal.

The process is a tricky one — there are a lot of possible fees, penalties and ‘catches’ to beware of lest this move actually end up costing you money.

It is also getting harder to do. Credit card companies are try to stop losing customers, and they are also trying not to gain customers who are only there to take advantage of introductory rates before they move on again.

This is one credit card move that absolutely demands you read — and understand — all of the fine print. Different card companies handle it in different ways and have a wide range of fine print containing a myriad of rules.

But just because hopping from one card company to another is harder than it used to be rates for balance transfers, but there are low fixed rates offered for balance transfers (that’s the card company’s way of getting you to bring your balance and stay).

Key numbers

If you do not transfer to a fixed rate (or even if you do because fixed — the rate you are getting, how long it lasts and what it jumps to when that rate is over. With a fixed rate you may not know when it will change, but there will at least be a guaranteed period before it can change.

After you have those numbers, check out all of the related costs:

• Does either company charge a fee for moving the balance?
• Is that fee a flat sum or a percentage?
• Does your old card company charge you another fee for terminating your account?
• What fees and rates does the new company charge for new customers?
• Will both card companies notify you when the transfer is done?
• Under what circumstances can the new company change the introductory rate it gives you for your balance transfer?

Beware of ‘tiered’ arrangements. These will let you transfer a balance and give you some sort of interest amnesty or super low rate for a period, and then there may be another rate or arrangement for some more time, then a third (or even a fourth) rate. The trap here is that you may start with a great arrangement and slowly find your deal getting worse and worse.

Different rates

There may also be different rates for purchases you make with your new card. For example you may transfer with no interest for three months on your transferred balance and any new purchases. Then for three months you may have different, but not too bad, rates for what’s left of the balance but a higher rate for new purchases In the third and sometimes fourth tiers both rates could rise to the point where you don’t have a good deal any more.

So make sure you know how you intend to pay off your transferred debt.

If you are sure you can pay it off during that interest payment holiday or super teaser rate it may be a good deal. If you’re not sure, think again. If you know it won’t happen, go to your calculator and work on different scenarios. You may find that if you haven’t paid off enough of the transferred balance in, say a year, you’re actually moving into a worse deal.

Some card company’s limit how much you can transfer or how many times you can transfer a balance. Make sure you use your calculator because the more complex the transfer arrangements the more chances the movement might not be as beneficial as your at first thought.

One thing is surprisingly commonly overlooked in balance transfers — are there fees? Not only might the new card company charge you, but your old one might charge you a fee for the transfer and even a penalty fee for closing the account. They may also charge you more money to manage any money you leave behind with them if you don’t transfer your total balance. Check it out, be sure!

Also be clear just how long the whole process will take, when you stop paying on the old card and start paying on the new. You don’t want to find you’re paying for a balance in two places at the same time, however briefly.

Make very sure too that you know under what circumstances your new card company can change the rate your transfer is being charged. Sometimes a late payment, or maybe some other obscure transgression, will automatically end your deal and bounce you into a stratospheric rate. Know every circumstance under which they can do this.