High qualityinvestment planning software is necessary to generate a fully personalized family financial strategy

Our free “financial freedom guide” personal financial planning website publishes write-ups on how to produce do-it-yourself personal financial plans

The financial and investment planning postings on this free information site supply important ideas to households about personal finance plan topics that they should consider. These essays help in establishing a lifelong personal finance planning strategy. Furthermore, to generate a fully comprehensive plan for financial success requires that you use a first-rate financial planning calculator with the top investment calculator and the top financial calculators.

Furthermore, this free financial freedom web site helps you to find a superior ALL-IN-ONE home financial software home software product with the leading financial retirement planning program, a high quality home budget planner, and a superior investment planner for your personally customized life time family financial planning.

Gauge the level of your portfolio’s overall diversification with this free on-line tool

Whenever you invest in multiple mutual funds and ETFs, you may wonder how broadly and appropriately diversified your aggregate portfolio might be. Have your investment holdings and mutual funds that you have chosen increased the global diversification of your personal financial asset portfolio? Do they just duplicate what you already own?

There is a free on-line tool that you can use to measure your portfolio diversification, and better understand the relative contribution that each of your investments makes to your goal of holding a broadly diversified global investment portfolio. On the Morningstar website, you can find their “Instant X-Ray” tool. Go to the Morningstar site at http://www.morningstar.com/

Click the “Tools” tab in the horizontal bar, select the “Morningstar Tools” pull down menu, and then choose “Instant X-Ray.” To go directly to this tool, use this URL:
http://portfolio.morningstar.com/NewPort/Free/InstantXRayDEntry.aspx

To use the Instant X-Ray Tool, just enter the ticker symbols for all of the mutual funds, ETFs, and individual securities that you own or intend to own with the dollar value of each holding. Then, click “Show Instant X-Ray” to see a summary of your overall portfolio.

Note that when you enter only one mutual fund or ETF ticker symbol or only one stock or bond holding into the Instant X-Ray Tool, the summary provides data for that single fund or security. This can be very useful, as you evaluate individual investment funds and investment securities. When you enter multiple funds, you will get an overview that blends all the funds and securities in proportion to the dollar values that you enter for each holding.

This free Instant X-Ray summary provides a variety of data about your overall portfolio. The overview allows you to evaluate how diversified your portfolio is on a variety of dimensions, including the major dimensions that are summarized in the other articles on this website about selecting a broadly diversified investment portfolio. (See the Sitemap for these articles.)

Incidentally, if you click on the other views that are offered with the Instant X-Ray tool, then Morningstar will try to get you to sign up for a “Premium” subscription. The information provided by this free summary overview in the Instant X-Ray tool is sufficient, and you are not required to pay for a premium subscription.

Note that there is no relationship between this website and Morningstar, and this website did not receive any form of consideration, financial or otherwise, to write this article. The “Instant X-Ray” is a useful financial tool for individual investors, and that is why we have provided this article.

Financial planning calculators are needed to develop a much more reasonable family financial strategy

This free financial freedom website publishes documents on how to produce a do-it-yourself family financial plan

The personal finance plan articles on this free information site give important considerations to families and individuals about personal financial plan topics that they should think about. These write-ups help in developing a lifelong personal finance planning strategy. In addition, to develop a really useful plan for financial success depends upon you using an excellent financial planning tool with superior home financial software and a sophisticated lifetime investment calculator. This free “create financial freedom” website enables you to find the top ALL-IN-ONE personal finance software tool home PC program with the best retirement savings calculator, the top family budget software, and the top investment financial calculator for your do-it-yourself lifelong financial planning.

Financial Planning Security and Identity Theft Prevention

You should take the potential for financial identity theft very seriously, as a threat to your financial security. Identity theft can sometimes entail loss of your financial assets, whether small or large. However, very often it requires taking a very large amount of your time to rectify an identity theft breach. Given the interconnectedness of the personal asset and personal credit system, any breech of your financial identity can have very time consuming ramifications, and the value of your time can many times exceed the value of the money that might have been stolen from you or from some firm through your stolen identity. Furthermore, once your identity is “out on the black market” you are more vulnerable to subsequent attacks. Taking certain steps to prevent an occurrence of identity theft in the first place is prudent. This is why identity theft prevention is a key, but often overlooked, component of a prudent financial plan.

Protection Practices for Sensitive Information and Passwords on Banking, Mutual Fund, Investment, and other Financial Websites

As you set up Internet accessible financial accounts, be very careful with your financial information. Furthermore, as you utilize the Internet it is important that you use what are known as “strong” passwords with more characters (combinations of letters, numbers, special symbols, upper and lower cases). Vary your passwords from one account to another. Never use the same password across your important financial sites. It is much better to maintain list of different passwords that you carefully protect at home, rather than to use a single weak or even strong password across various financial websites. Furthermore, it is a good practice to vary your user name from one account to another. In effect, different user names and different passwords in combination make your identity on any single site much more secure.

Therefore, it is recommended by security authorites that all your financial passwords for your on-line accounts be both strong and different. Many identity thieves are clever and sophisticated. Furthermore, there is a cyber underground and internet black market where compromised identity information is shared, bought, and sold. This cyber crime underground stretches around the world. When your user names and passwords are both strong and different, you could avoid a single identity breach from cascading across your other financial accounts.

Avoid using more sensitive information, such as mother’s maiden name or your city/state/date of birth, for example, as your answer to security challenge questions on any ordinary, non-financial website.  Reserve this information only for those sites that hold your financial accounts and your financially sensitive information. Simply assume that the vast majority of websites have absolute amateurs in charge of their website systems architecture and security. While this may not be true of any given website that attempts to collect sensitive information from you, assuming that the site security is poor is a wiser assumption, because you never know which site could be the weak link. Systems administrators of financial web sites tend to be much more sophisticated concerning security affairs, but they certainly are not infallible. Furthermore, all it takes is one corrupt employee at firm with strong or weak web systems security, to circumvent any protections that are in place.

Deal with Financial Services Company and Non-Financial Websites

With less important and non-financial web sites that require registration, you could use the same username and the same easily remembered strong password. However, it would be very wise never provide these sites with any additional information that is accurate about your name, address, phones, the security challenge answers above and other potentially sensitive information. Always assume that security on any of these “unimportant” web sites could be breached and that your password information could be used to access other accounts elsewhere. By drawing a strong distinction between the user names and passwords that you use on financial and other sites that are important to you versus those unimportant sites requiring registration information, you can in part firewall yourself from security breaches in the less well managed part of the Internet. Why supply via perhaps a forum registration to some hobby web site your actual name, address, etc. And, certainly do not supply your date of birth or mother’s maiden name as the answer to the security challenge questions. If that forum website’s membership database is breached you will have supplied key information needed to breach the financial accounts that are really important to you.

Access to your personal email system or systems should require a strong and different password. Stored email messages can contain passwords for which a thief could search. Furthermore, on your home computer systems, you should always have a fully functioning firewall and up-to-date anti-virus/anti-spyware software that is always on.

Take these issues seriously. Cyber crime is worldwide, cooperative, and increasing sophisticated. Since it is highly profitable and risks of criminal prosecution are low, do you think this problem is going to go away. The prudent thing to do is to keep identity theft away from your door, if you can.

Avoid Phishing and Other Impersonation Attacks

Avoid phishing of all kinds. For example, never provide any personal data of any kind in response to a link provided to you via email. Always ensure that the URL of the site you are using is the correct URL. If you are ever in doubt, type in the URL yourself or search for the site on Google and then enter the site with the link from Google.

Furthermore, never enter any financial information or other sensitive information into any website that does not use the secure “https” protocol (note the “s” added to “http”). When buying over the Internet with a credit card or otherwise, if a site does not use https, do not use it. Use only one credit card when buying on the web. If that credit card is compromised, you can close that credit account number and replace the card.