NEWS HIGHLIGHTS

Big box stores might begin offering financial services

A big box store (also supercenter, superstore, or megastore) is a physically large retail establishment, usually part of a chain. The term sometimes also refers, by extension, to the company that operates the store. The store may sell general dry goods in which case it is a department store

Will you buy your next CD, that would be a financial instrument not a musical one, at Wal-Mart? Maybe. The three year moratorium on banks affiliated with non-financial businesses has expired. Unless a new rule is made, stores like Wal-Mart and Home Depot could start offering services such as savings accounts, affordable credit and CDs to their customers.

Banks will complain about risks of nonbankers going into the business, but when Dodd-Frank was passed in 2010, only the governments of Fiji, Guernsey and the Isle of Mann prohibited such bank charters.

Competition in banking services another important interest. They allow large firms in any industry to fail without disrupting the entire banking system.

Wal-Mart has operated a full service bank in Mexico for some years and a bank that issues credit cards in Canada. Tesco, the British retail chain, created Tesco Finance in 2007. Currently, it holds billions of dollars worth of mortgagees, personal loans and credit card debt for British citizens.

The grandfathered banking subsidiaries of Target, Harley-Davidson and Toyota are examples of companies with very low rates standing at 2.35 percent. They extend credit mainly to their own customers.

Advisors quoted in The Wall Street Journal say for safety, convenience and price, the United States needs to join the rest of the world and allow nonfinancial companies to own and operate banks.

Car repair prices rise

The average car on the road in the U.S. is about 11 years old. Mechanics are making more money. No surprise that auto repair prices are on the rise. Auto repair costs rose by 10 percent compared to 2012.

The most common alert from car computers is for a faulty oxygen sensor. It costs $294 to repair. But if you let it go, you'll spend about $900 a year in wasted gasoline.

Loose or broken gas caps are also common. Faulty catalytic converters crop up frequently. They are an expensive problem that is usually the result of ignoring some other fault for too long, according to CNNMoney.

Looking for a good deal on a rental car?

Though Hertz got bigger when it acquired Dollar, Thrifty, and Avis acquired Zip-car, both are facing big competition from smaller companies.

To find a bargain, check companies like Advantage and Fox as well as Dollar and Thrifty. Check prices on off-airport locations and use a shuttle to get there.

If you're booking a hotel and airline ticket check package deals that include a rental car. Reserve early but check back for better deals.

Use your discounts from organizations like AARP, AAA, USAA and Costco, to name a few.

Marijuana no longer banned at the Olympics

Marijuana is off the list of banned substances. Olympic athletes can now smoke marijuana, but not on game day. The drug has been removed from the World Anti-Doping Agency's list of banned substances.

WADA oversees Olympic drug testing worldwide. WADA has raised the allowable threshold for a positive test. The new level is meant to catch athletes who smoke only during the period of competition. It isn't prohibited outside that period.
Authorities say that in the past, many cases of use did not involve game or event day competition. Players are tested on the day of the event.

WADA bans substances based on any or all of three criteria: Performance enhancement, danger to an athlete's health, and violation of the spirit of the sport. Marijuana is now legal in Canada and 16 U.S. states suggesting that attitudes toward the drug are changing.

For a fee, TSA expands its pre-check program to any passenger

The Transportation Security Administration is dramatically expanding its program to get travelers through checkpoints faster. They want 25 percent of travelers to be enrolled in the Pre-check program by the end of 2013 and half of all travelers enrolled by the end of 2015.

Pre-check is an option for travelers without passports. It's important for ordinary travelers who aren't frequent fliers. There are now enrollment centers at Washington's Dulles and Indianapolis airports, but soon there will be enrollment centers at most airports.

TSA says the program is a shift from using the same security
procedure for everyone to focusing the most security on the riskiest travelers at their usual checkpoints.

The cost is $85 for a five year enrollment to cover the cost of background checks and fingerprinting. Pre-check offers travelers separate lines at checkpoints where they can leave on their shoes and light coats and keep laptops in their bags.

Several airlines invite qualified frequent fliers to join at no cost and with little more than the information provided when buying a ticket.

New building in China is the largest in the world

Chengdu's New Century Global Center is the world's largest freestanding building. It opened earlier this year. CNN reports that the building has 18.9 million square feet of floor space.The building will be capable of housing 20 Sydney Opera houses. It's almost three times the size of the Pentagon in Washington, D.C.

The Global Center has an ocean theme and will house a huge artificial beach with a seafront promenade and an artificial sun. It will also be home to offices, theaters, hotels, shopping malls and even a fake Mediterranean village.

"This is an ocean city built by man," says guide Liu Xun. There are 1,000 rooms in the hotel and all have seaside views. The artificial sun shines 24 hours a day. The system uses
specialized lighting technology that heats the building as well as illuminates it.

Exercise at midlife pays off for decades later

In their 40s and 50s, people who made a point of staying fit in their youth may start wondering if lifting weights, exercising at home or going to the gym is still worth the time and effort.

There has always been some evidence that people who are fit at midlife are more likely to be healthy in their 60s, 70s and 80s. The best evidence available now comes from the Cooper Institute in Dallas. It has a database of patients who have gone to their preventive medicine clinic since 1970.

Chronic illnesses

Their study, published in the September Archives of Internal Medicine, focused on data from 18,000 healthy people whose cardiovascular fitness was measured by treadmill tests in their 40s or 50s. By examining Medicare claims on these subjects, researchers found that those who were most fit were much less likely to develop heart disease, Alzheimer's, diabetes, kidney disease, colon or lung cancer during the next 20 to 30 years.

Dementia

They also found that subjects who were fittest at midlife were one-third less likely to develop dementia in their 70s and 80s. Cardiovascular fitness helps prevent dementia by reducing the risk of diabetes and hypertension, both of which can contribute to dementia. But even after controlling these factors the reduced risk for dementia and Alzheimer's disease remained.

Fitness now

Doctors at the University of California, Berkeley, say one benefit of being fit in middle age is that it increases the likelihood that you'll continue to exercise, eat well and stop smoking.
If you're past middle age and didn't exercise much back then, you can still get many of the benefits of midlife fitness if you start to exercise now. It's never too late to start improving your fitness level with exercise and other healthy habits.

Obama signs bill linking student loan rates to the 10 year Treasury note

After a months long debate, the Senate and House of Representatives agreed on a bill that links federal student loans to a market based rate. They sent the bill to the White House, and President Obama signed it.

The legislation ties the interest rate on federal student loans to the government's borrowing costs on the 10 year Treasury note. Stafford loans for undergraduates, the government's most widely used student loan program, would be set about two percentage points more than the Treasury yield.

The bill affects only new loans, not existing student loans. Under that measure, undergraduates who take out loans for the coming school year would pay an interest rate of 3.86 percent based on Treasury yields from this spring. The rate will remain fixed for the life of the loan. Interest rates for graduate students and their parents will be slightly higher than rates for undergraduates.

Passage of the bill resolves a dispute in Congress about a measure that expired July 1 which allowed the interest rate of some new student loans to double to 6.8 percent. Both parties wanted to prevent the rate increase but disagreed over how to set rates over the long term. The interest rate on loans taken out next year and thereafter could be higher since treasury yields are projected to rise as the economy strengthens.

'Oracle of Omaha' tells his investment strategy

Corralled during a break at Berkshire Hathaway's annual meeting, CEO Warren Buffett said, "If investors try to time their purchases according to economic forecasts ... they'll make a lot of money for their brokers, but not much for themselves."

He's said it before and now says it again: "Buy what you know." He doesn't buy automobile stocks because he doesn't know what will be popular in five years. He's almost 100 percent confident about the future of Burlington Northern railroad and insurer Geico which are both Berkshire properties.

"Invest in businesses, not stocks." He says you should consider any stock investment as if you were buying the entire company.

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