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Your Money: Aging Parents and Children Should Talk About Finances

May 24, 2013 by Leave a Comment

She and her two older siblings tried to have that talk with their mother, a retired microbiologist, on several occasions, but she would promptly steer the conversation in another direction. Then in February, their mother died unexpectedly at age 74 after falling down the stairs of her home in Santa Fe, N.M. And since the family never had the money conversation, once they finally learned their mother had a mortgage, it was already in default.

The mortgage bank said it couldn’t divulge any private information to the family without a death certificate, which was still pending because the exact cause of death wasn’t immediately obvious. So Ms. Crawford and her two older siblings didn’t know how much was owed, or whether they had to catch up on any missed payments.

The bank was willing to withdraw the money owed from a family member’s checking account, but Ms. Crawford, a 43-year-old mother of two young children in Berkeley, Calif., said she and her siblings were unwilling to do that without knowing the exact amount. Besides, they figured, it shouldn’t take that much longer for the death certificate to arrive.

But two months after their mother’s death, there was still no certificate. Around the same time, Ms. Crawford found a package for a loan modification on her mother’s doorstep — the loan was indeed in default. Ms. Crawford’s sister called the bank again. But this time, she decided to throw out some random numbers to the sympathetic bank representative, who responded with “higher” or “lower.” So Ms. Crawford’s sister was able to figure out that they owed about $3,500, and she made the payment.

“There is this period of gray where you are navigating this legal process but the whole system keeps moving and you have to pay the bills,” said Ms. Crawford, a freelance editor.

The three siblings had also had to rummage through boxes and file cabinets when they all initially gathered at their mother’s adobe-style home. They found some items where you might expect them to be — credit cards were in a wallet; a will in her office. But the car insurance policy turned up in their mother’s knitting bag.

“There was always this impression that money was very tight for her, even though we knew from the divorce from my dad that she was well established,” said Ms. Crawford, whose father was a hand surgeon and died just weeks before their mother. “In an ideal world, you have the conversation and take the emotion out of it.”

A lot of the family’s difficulty came from the delay in the death certificate, which the estate planning lawyers I spoke with said was not typical. Had their mother been willing to talk more about her financial affairs, it would have saved them a lot of stress and frustration. Yet there are many adult children just like them, who may eventually need to step in and handle their parent’s affairs for several months or far longer, even during their lifetime.

Here are some ideas on how to get that conversation started, along with several financial and legal fixes that would have made life easier for families like Ms. Crawford’s.

THE TALK “Finances tend to be one of the trickiest topics because people do have traditional ideas about what you should and shouldn’t talk about,” explained Amy Goyer, a caregiving expert at AARP, who is also handling her own parents’ affairs because her father has Alzheimer’s. “It’s a difficult thing to talk about,” so acknowledge that with your parents.

Before you even broach the topic, adult children should think about the sort of information they are seeking, she explained. After all, you need to know much more than whether a will exists. Are there powers of attorney or advanced health care directives in place? What does their health insurance cover? Do they have life insurance? Have they made a list of every single account that they owe or collect money from?

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/25/your-money/aging-parents-and-children-should-talk-about-finances.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Corner Office | Selina Lo: Selina Lo of Ruckus Wireless, on Leadership vs. Management

October 23, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Q. Do you remember the first time you were someone’s boss?

A. When I was a student at Berkeley, a real estate company hired me to computerize all its investment listings.  I started there part time in my junior year, and when I graduated, it needed me to stay on for another year to finish the project.  And one of the things it offered me, as an incentive, was to let me manage a programming team. And that was my first time being a manager. The other programmer obviously felt that I wasn’t qualified to manage her. And it was not something I enjoyed.

As a young manager, I had no idea what to do other than supervise the actual work. I also felt that as a manager, the one thing you do is you take care of your people.  So we were flying on a business trip, and when we got off the plane, I said, “Hey, remember your briefcase.”  I was just looking out for her.  But she took it as me micromanaging her. And that got escalated up to my boss, and I just thought, “Wow, why would anybody want to manage people?” 

Then I went to Hewlett-Packard, where I had two mentors, and they really showed me how to get things done within the organization, both on the formal and informal track. And during my six years there, I actually got trained on a lot of the formality of being a manager, and the responsibility. 

But I still did not want to be a manager. I decided that I liked to touch things and to do things too much.  Part of being a manager is that you have to deal with other people’s pace and style of doing things.  I didn’t want to have to deal with that, and throughout my H.P. career, I would completely excel on everything in my performance review except for teamwork.  They would always say, you have to respect other people’s opinions.     

Q. So what changed?

A. When I was young and very single-mindedly focused on my career, I realized that you have to be a manager to move up.  And so, even though I resisted management all those years at H.P., when I moved on to another company, management was offered to me again, and I accepted it because I felt it was good for my career. I thought that H.P. was incredibly political. But little did I know what politics really meant.  In my next job there were different camps, and a hostile environment. That reinforced my feelings about not wanting to be a manager.   

And because of that experience, I swore to myself that if I had any control of the environment, it would never be political. I would never let internal problems become the agenda, and that has been the theme in my career since then. So the next goal for me was, how do I get myself into an environment where I can control who I hire? That was really why I got into this whole start-up thing.   

Q. And so how has your leadership style evolved?

A. I’m impatient.  I can occasionally get emotional, and sometimes when you’re too passionate about something, it can become disruptive. However, the one thing I learned is that a lot of people actually respond well to that because it means you can cut through all the stuff and get things done. That was what I lived for — to get things done, and really be the cheerleader for those people who want to move faster than the system is moving. 

But I also had a wake-up call. One of my employees told me that he wanted to report to another person. He said my pace was just way too fast for him, and I was just way too abrupt, that I was too demanding and expected people to know what I wanted just by osmosis. He also told me that I created too much stress for him and that he was having trouble sleeping. And I thought, really?  It had not occurred to me that people would actually have a physical reaction to my style.  And so that was a wake-up call.  I was greatly humbled.   

There’s a Chinese proverb that doesn’t translate very well, but it’s basically a spoonful of sugar, a spoonful of tar.  Tar is like the Chinese medicine, the herbal thing that is always very bitter, and that was me. And so, people love me and hate me at the same time.  But I thought that was O.K.  The problem I had was the balance. I’m sure, even today, people love me and hate me at the same time.  Today, I’m much more mindful of that balance.  But in those days, the hate part completely dominated the love part.    

Q. You joined Ruckus in its infancy, so you had a chance to set the culture early on. What did you decide to do?

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=4f687ba8278c7ef8a9e12ffc29320d53

Filed Under: Business News Tagged With: , ,

Study Sees Way to Win Spam Fight

May 20, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Now they have concluded an experiment that is not for the faint of heart: for three months they set out to receive all the spam they could (no quarantines or filters need apply), then systematically made purchases from the Web sites advertised in the messages.

The hope, the scientists said, was to find a “choke point” that could greatly reduce the flow of spam. And in a paper to be presented on Tuesday at the annual IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy in Oakland, Calif., they will report that they think they have found it.

It turned out that 95 percent of the credit card transactions for the spam-advertised drugs and herbal remedies they bought were handled by just three financial companies — one based in Azerbaijan, one in Denmark and one in Nevis, in the West Indies.

The researchers looked at nearly a billion messages and spent several thousand dollars on about 120 purchases. No single purchase was more than $277.

If a handful of companies like these refused to authorize online credit card payments to the merchants, “you’d cut off the money that supports the entire spam enterprise,” said one of the scientists, Stefan Savage of the University of California, San Diego, who worked with colleagues at San Diego and Berkeley and at the International Computer Science Institute.

Visa, the largest credit card company, declined to comment. But Steve Kirsch, chief executive of Abaca Technology, an antispam company based in San Jose, Calif., said the findings held the potential for “a very powerful deterrent” to spammers.

“If the credit card companies wanted to shut down the spammers, we can easily aid them in rapidly and unambiguously identifying the merchant accounts used by spammers,” he said.

Spam has proved notoriously difficult to defeat over the years, despite sophisticated filtering technologies and legal investigations and convictions. Seven years after the famous prediction by Bill Gates, then chairman of Microsoft, that spam would be eradicated in just two years, about 90 percent of all e-mail is spam.

An earlier study undertaken by the scientists showed that a single commercial spam e-mail campaign generated three messages for every person on the planet. That same study revealed that to sell $100 worth of Viagra, a spam provider needed to send 12.5 million messages.

“In the end, spam is an advertising business,” Dr. Savage said in an interview. “However, it only makes sense if you can find a way to take people’s money.

“This means credit cards. Credit cards are the only payment platform that is ubiquitously available to Western consumers and can be used for Internet commerce.”

Merchants must work with a bank that is authorized to handle the transactions, he said, but most banks already refuse to work with shady sellers. If the financial companies like those found in the study would follow suit, then spammers would have to find new banks — and the cost of switching would be high. Moreover, it is difficult to mask high-risk transactions, making it relatively easy to maintain blacklists.

“It is the banking component of the spam value chain that is both the least studied and, we believe, the most critical,” the researchers write.

The computer scientists say that because the spam system relies on just a few banks and an even smaller number of credit card processors, the business is highly vulnerable to disruption by regulators and law enforcement agencies.

Moreover, legal pressure is increasing on other advertising channels used by online pharmacies. Last week Google reported in its quarterly financial statement that it had set aside $500 million
to resolve a Justice Department criminal investigation into the company’s practice of accepting advertising from online pharmacies.

In their report, the University of California researchers looked at a campaign organized by a brand named Pharmacy Express, part of the Mailien marketing group, based in Russia.

On Oct. 27, 2010, for instance, a network of zombie computers called the Grum botnet delivered an e-mail with “Viagra Official Site” in the subject line. Users who responded to the message were directed to a Web site that had been registered nine days earlier.

The Internet system that supported the Web site was spread around the globe: the domain registrar was in Russia, the server computer was in China, and a proxy server computer was in Brazil. When a purchase was made from the Web site, the shopper was redirected from a computer in Turkey to the Azerigazbank Joint-Stock Investment Bank in Baku, Azerbaijan. The drugs themselves were sent directly from a manufacturer in India.

The weak link in the system, the researchers noted, was that the Visa payment system handled the transaction between the customer’s bank in the United States and the bank in Azerbaijan.

Efforts to contact the Azerigazbank and the Mailien marketing group were unsuccessful.

By blocking the transactions at the point at which the consumer uses a credit card, it is possible to shift the burden of cost to the spammer.

“The defenders can, in principle, identify which banks the scammers are using far faster than they can get new banks,” Dr. Savage said, “and for basically zero cost.”

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=eecf6edd0378a9e4bbca1b851684c871

Filed Under: Business News Tagged With: , ,

Study Sees Credit Cards as ‘Choke Point’ for Spam

May 19, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Now they have concluded an experiment that is not for the faint of heart: for three months they set out to receive all the spam they could (no quarantines or filters need apply), then systematically made purchases from the Web sites advertised in the messages.

The hope, the scientists said, was to find a “choke point” that could greatly reduce the flow of spam. And in a paper to be presented on Tuesday at the annual IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy in Oakland, Calif., they will report that they think they have found it.

It turned out that 95 percent of the credit card transactions for the spam-advertised drugs and herbal remedies they bought were handled by just three financial companies — one based in Azerbaijan, one in Denmark and one in Nevis, in the West Indies. In the course of the study, the researchers looked at nearly a billion messages and spent several thousand dollars on about 120 purchases. No single purchase was more than $277.

If a handful of companies like these refused to authorize online credit card payments to the merchants, “you’d cut off the money that supports the entire spam enterprise,” said one of the scientists, Stefan Savage of the University of California, San Diego, who worked with colleagues at San Diego and Berkeley and at the International Computer Science Institute.

Visa, the largest credit card company, declined to comment. But Steve Kirsch, chief executive of Abaca Technology, an antispam company based in San Jose, Calif., said the findings held the potential for “a very powerful deterrent” to spammers.

“If the credit card companies wanted to shut down the spammers, we can easily aid them in rapidly and unambiguously identifying the merchant accounts used by spammers,” he said.

Spam has proved notoriously difficult to defeat over the years, despite sophisticated filtering technologies and legal investigations and convictions. Seven years after the famous prediction by Bill Gates, then chairman 0f Microsoft, that spam would be eradicated in just two years, about 90 percent of all e-mail is spam.

An earlier study undertaken by the scientists showed that a single commercial spam e-mail campaign generated three messages for every person on the planet. That same study revealed that to sell $100 worth of Viagra, a spam provider needed to send 12.5 million messages.

“In the end, spam is an advertising business,” Dr. Savage said in an interview. “However, it only makes sense if you can find a way to take people’s money.

“This means credit cards. Credit cards are the only payment platform that is ubiquitously available to Western consumers and can be used for Internet commerce.”

Merchants must work with a bank that is authorized to handle the transactions, he said, but most banks already refuse to work with shady sellers. If the financial companies like those found in the study would follow suit, then spammers would have to find new banks — and the cost of switching would be high. Moreover, it is difficult to mask high-risk transactions, making it relatively easy to maintain blacklists.

“It is the banking component of the spam value chain that is both the least studied and, we believe, the most critical,” the researchers write.

The computer scientists say that because the spam system relies on just a few banks and an even smaller number of credit card processors, the business is highly vulnerable to disruption by regulators and law enforcement agencies.

Moreover, legal pressure is increasing on other advertising channels used by online pharmacies. Last week Google reported in its quarterly financial statement that it had set aside $500 million
to resolve a Justice Department criminal investigation into the company’s practice of accepting advertising from online pharmacies.

In their report, the University of California researchers looked at a campaign organized by a brand named Pharmacy Express, part of the Mailien marketing group, based in Russia.

On Oct. 27, 2010, for instance, a network of zombie computers called the Grum botnet delivered an e-mail with “Viagra Official Site” in the subject line. Users who responded to the message were directed to the Web site medicshopnerx.ru, which had been registered nine days earlier.

The Internet system that supported the Web site was spread around the globe: the domain registrar was in Russia, the server computer was in China, and a proxy server computer was in Brazil. When a purchase was made from the Web site, the shopper was redirected from a computer in Turkey to the Azerigazbank Joint-Stock Investment Bank in Baku, Azerbaijan. The drugs themselves were sent directly from a manufacturer in India.

The weak link in the system, the researchers noted, was that the Visa payment system handled the transaction between the customer’s bank in the United States and the bank in Azerbaijan.

Efforts to contact the Azerigazbank and the Mailien marketing group were unsuccessful.

By blocking the transactions at the point at which the consumer uses a credit card, it is possible to shift the burden of cost to the spammer.

“The defenders can, in principle, identify which banks the scammers are using far faster than they can get new banks,” Dr. Savage said, “and for basically zero cost.”

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=eecf6edd0378a9e4bbca1b851684c871

Filed Under: Business News Tagged With: , ,