Adoption laws vary from state to state, but all agencies will require a home study before placing a child with you. A social worker or case worker will meet with you and your family, investigate your history and your home, and report back to the agency. If you have filed for bankruptcy protection, this won’t necessarily prohibit you from adopting, but the case worker will consider it in her decision to approve you. You may have to take extra steps to overcome it.

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Reviewing a customer’s credit report to determine creditworthiness before you provide a loan or service helps minimize your risk. The credit bureaus consist of three large companies: Experian, TransUnion and Equifax. Loans, government claims, judgments or unpaid bills may be reported to one or all three of the credit bureaus, so choosing only one report might provide incomplete information. Purchasing a credit report directly from one of the main bureaus might prove too expensive if you have a small business.

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Pepper Home Loans has officially completed its acquisition of GE Capital’s $5 billion residential home loan book.

This acquisition will assist Pepper to take control of a larger portion of the non-conforming home loan market in Australia.

Pepper MD and CEO Patrick Tuttle sees this transaction as offering transformational opportunities for the non-bank lender.

This acquisition will enable Pepper Home Loans to gain greater exposure to self employed borrowers or borrowers with a bad credit history looking for debt consolidation or mortgage refinance deals.

Pepper executive chairman Mike Culhane said the strong support of senior facility providers, Commonwealth Bank of Australia, National Australia Bank and Westpac Banking Corporation, as well as mezzanine investors comprising Deutsche Bank AG, Värde Partners, Inc., York Capital Management, IFM’s Alternative Fixed Income Fund, MKM Capital and Sturt Capital, was instrumental was paramount in allowing Pepper to finance this acquisition.

Earlier this month I started my series on Dynasty Trusts (here). Then my blogging was disrupted by Moldavian terrorists(!), meaning that it has taken me a while to get back to the topic. However, I did want to address those three points I raised at the end of Part 1:

1. Who should be the trustee? One of the main goals of a Dynasty Trust is to avoid inclusion of the trust’s assets in the taxable estate of a beneficiary. You might think that inclusion would be easy to avoid, since we are talking about a trust that allows for only discretionary distributions. However, the estate tax laws are tricky — they sometimes allow for property NOT owned by a person to be included in the person’s taxable estate if the person had certain powers over the property.

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The bank of Mum and Dad can seem like the best bank to go to, they wont charge you interest, they wont chase your debts and they wont threaten you with legal action. But is it really the easy way out?

A trend that we are seeing at the moment is groups of 18-25 years olds who took out credit when it was offered to them only to now find they are struggling to pay it back. Some are facing up to their problems and seeking help to pay back their debts, while others are paying visits to the bank of Mum and Dad for help.

While this can seem like the easy option, does it really teach young people a valuable financial lesson and help them to appreciate money?

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