If his timing is right, he could be regarded as the Canadian Robert Shiller. If his timing’s off, he’ll be another Chicken Little.

Whether he’ll be right or not is a crapshoot, since there’s no new data to suggest the market should sway one way or the other in the coming months.

They were also able to get better than card present rates from the networks, which puts them in a position to reap fees from ApplePay transactions. Make no mistake, this isn’t just a play to improve iPhone functionality; they are going to make serious money from this.

This is Apple doing what they do best: hiding the complexities like tokenization and its economics, taking existing technologies like NFC, secure elements and biometrics, and presenting it all in a simple, easy to understand package at the perfect time.

Apple is in a great position to make mobile payments succeed. They already have 800 million iTunes account holders, they don’t want our transaction data (so they claim), and they have the marketing and brand cachet to make mobile payments sexy. This might be one of the few products that actually moves the mobile payments needle.

Before I get into my analysis of the Loft card, I will preface with this: I hate points systems. Credit card companies try to entice me with 20,000 “bonus miles” on signup, but I have no idea what that actually means…. It’s 1000 miles from SFO to Vancouver, so does that mean they’re going to let me fly back and forth 20 times just for signing up for their card? (The answer, of course, is no.) And I don’t have time to visit each issuer’s website to try to decipher what types of real rewards their points translate to.

With Loft, it’s a bit simpler: I can boil it down into percent cash back, and compare with other cash back cards. For Loft, they give you a $20 certificate for 2,000 points earned, and you get 5 points for every $1 you spend. Doing the math, you’ll need to spend $400 before you collect that $20 certificate, which equates to a 5% cash back deal. That’s actually not too bad — definitely on par with the Target and Amazon cards.

The Loft card hooked me in with its initial 15% our first purchase, and the $15 bonus on your birthday is cute, but I was sure I was getting hosed even as I signed up for it. Turns out it’s a pretty good card after all.

The peak of the market was in May 2010, and since then it’s been weak, although no one seems to have noticed just yet. If the price drops start accelerating and looking more precipitous, I’m sure we’ll hear a lot more about it. I still think we’re going to see a hard crash and not a soft landing like many are hoping for.

“The average rate for a 30-year fixed mortgage increased to 4.39 percent in the week ended today from 4.31 percent…. The 30-year average has climbed from a near-record low of 3.35 percent in early May. It’s still below the average of about 5.3 percent for the past 10 years, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.”

We refinanced our 30-year mortgage back in May, and this news makes me glad we didn’t get an ARM. But apparently not everyone shares my sentiment: ARM applications are up, accounting for 16% of mortgage requests — the highest level since July 2008. If people are getting ARMs because they can’t afford 30-year rates, it doesn’t bode well for the health of the market as interest rates creep up.

Of course, practically every other industrialized nation has nothing but ARMs — only the U.S. and Denmark have 30-year mortgages — so perhaps I’m overreacting. Or perhaps the entire global housing market is screwed.

Thanks to Bay Area Real Estate Trends for the heads up.

However, comparing my home to the gorgeous mansion on Zillow’s front page makes me less than happy.

Oh well, one day.

Long story short, the annual mortgage insurance premium (MIP) is going up .1% for regular loans and .05% for jumbo loans. No changes to the Upfront MIP. See here for an updated change history.

I started a 529 plan the day my daughter was born, but I started thinking about Roth IRAs recently because they don’t need to be earmarked for education — if your kid ends up not going to college, at least you can use the money for retirement — and I like the idea of my money not being tied up for any one thing. But I also like the idea of having more money. So what’s the best way to maximize the growth of my kid’s college fund, minimize the taxes I have to pay, and maximize the amount of financial aid she’ll get when’s ready for school (after all, free money is good)?

I Googled “529 vs Roth IRA” and found that most of the articles were kind of lacking, to put it politely. Most provide an incomplete picture, or are misleading, or both. There are also proponents for both sides of the argument. That there’s even an argument makes it all the more confusing — the Internets has not provided a clear-cut answer. It helps to understand some of the terms that are being thrown around, so here are the key definitions that were important for my understanding:

• Contributions vs Earnings: your contributions are what you contribute to your kid’s plan — in other words, the just principal, not the earnings/interest. Earnings refers to the interest and, um, earnings that accrue as the value of your fund goes up (ideally).
  This distinction matters because, for a Roth IRA, you are only able to make an early (before age 59½) withdrawal of the contributions portion of your Roth IRA if you want to avoid taxes and penalties. The earnings portion of your Roth IRA is still subject to additional taxation upon withdrawal, even for education purposes.
• Savings/Balance vs Distributions: some articles refer to your savings or balance when they refer to how much is in your fund. Distributions, on the other hand, is what you actually take out to help pay for your kid’s education.
  This distinction matters when applying for financial aid from Uncle Sam: while your Roth IRA balance doesn’t impact the amount of financial aid your child gets, your distribution does. (529 distributions also impact the amount of financial aid, but not as much as a Roth IRA.)

Ray Martin from CBS News provides a nice recap:

• Roth IRA contributions (i.e. the principal, i.e. what you put in yourself) can be taken out and used for any purpose, without tax or or the 10% penalty.
• Roth IRA earnings that come out before age 59½ are taxable (but not penalized) even when used for college expenses. (Normally there’s a 10% penalty for early distribution, but this can be waived under the special exception for higher-education expenses.)
• Withdrawals from your Roth IRA impacts the amount of financial aid that your child receives: “The entire IRA distribution, taxable or not, must be included in base-year income on the student’s federal financial-aid application for the following year.”

What does this all mean? It boils down to three questions: 1) Are you positive your child is going to college? 2) Are you planning on paying for your child’s entire education? 3) Will the contribution portion of your Roth IRA be sufficient to fund what you’d like to contribute to your child’s education?

A Roth IRA makes sense if you plan on using just the principal amount for your child’s education — i.e. none of the earnings/interest, which could be a lot of money. ($10,000 would more than double to $20,520 over 18 years, assuming a 4% return rate. If you need any of that earned $10,520 to cover your child’s education expenses, expect to pay taxes on those earnings, unless you’re lucky/unlucky enough to be 59½ by then.) Unless you can pour a ton of money into your Roth IRA, there’s a good chance you won’t have enough in contributions to cover the entire cost of school.

Then there’s the financial aid question. If you use any of your earnings (again, not contributions) from your Roth IRA to pay for your child’s education, it could possibly affect your financial aid eligibility. You may be fine in the first year, but when you apply for aid in the second year, the earnings portion of the distributions from your IRA in year one are included in your income. All of a sudden it looks to the government like you’re making a lot of dough, which may cause financial aid to dry up.

529 withdrawals, on the other hand, are less heavily weighted: only 5.6% of the value of the 529 account is included in calculations for financial aid.

For my personal situation, I am going to stop contributing to the 529 and instead contribute to the Roth IRA. While I’m fairly certain my daughter is going to college, I’ve come to grips with the fact that she’ll need to pay at least some of her way via loans and part-time jobs, and we’ll help her however we can with the contributions portion of our Roth IRA. The gift of a free ride through college would be great, but the gift of not having to care for her parents because they didn’t save enough for retirement would be greater.