Money Minute: 5 ways wedding guests can save money and stay sane-By Mandi Woodruff

Forget the bride and groom -- weddings can be expensive for guests, too! The average wedding guest will shell out nearly $700 to see their loved ones walk down the aisle, according to the latest data from American Express.

Finding the right gift is only half the budget battle. Here are a few tips to help you save as a wedding guest.
1. If you were too late to lock in the group hotel rate, you might still have options. Get at least 10 people together and you can try reserving your own block at a discount. Or try booking a group through sites like Priceline or Hotelplanner.com. Or, skip the hotel and get a rental from Airbnb or HomeAway.com. The average hotel rate for wedding guests is about $170 a night, so use that as a good baseline when hunting down deals.
2. All those pre-wedding festivities can really add up. You’ve got engagement parties... bridal showers...bachelor parties in Vegas...ugh! Listen -- If you aren’t super close to the bride and groom, skip one (or all) of these events and save your money. No one will hold it against you.
3. Airfare is hands down the biggest expense for wedding guests, costing an average $225. The best time to buy flights for weddings is six weeks before the big day, so as soon as you get your invite, put a reminder on your calendar. Tuesdays and Wednesday mornings are the best. If you’re flying internationally, start looking for deals five to six months out.
4. Stick to the registry and buy your gift early -- people always go for the cheap stuff first!
5. Nothing to wear to the nuptials? Try renting your dress or suit instead of buying something new you might only wear a couple of times.

 Culled from Yahoo Finance

This retirement investing tool might actually be working-By Ben Steverman

For a decade, a new kind of mutual fund has been taking over Americans’ retirement portfolios.

The target-date fund is designed for people with no knowledge of investing. You pick the fund closest to the year you expect to retire—the Vanguard Target Retirement 2030, for example—and the fund does the rest. Containing a variety of stock and bond funds, the all-in-one funds gradually and automatically get less risky as retirement approaches.
There’s now evidence that target-date funds may be working. They’re giving investors solid returns, data from research firm Morningstar show. Just as importantly, they're boosting those returns by protecting investors from their worst instincts.

Good thing, because the retirements of millions of Americans, and especially young people, now rely on target-date funds.
This year, for the first time, more than half of all 401(k) contributions will go into target-date funds, research firm Cerulli Associates estimates. It projects the assets in target-date funds to hit $2 trillion by 2019, when 88 percent of all 401(k) contributions will go into the funds.
With 10 years of history, there’s now enough of a track record to judge just how well investors are doing in target-date funds. The average per-year return over the past decade was 5 percent, Morningstar estimates. That’s about what you would expect from funds that are a blend of stock and bond funds. Stock funds were up an annual 7.5 percent over the past decade, while bond funds were up an average 4.4 percent.

But target-date funds have one big advantage over other kinds of mutual funds, the data show. The average mutual fund has a flaw, which is that the average investor hardly ever does as well as his or her funds. Investors tend to jump in and out of funds at the wrong time. They buy high, choosing funds only after they've done well. And they sell low, dumping underperforming funds just as they’re about to take off. Picture an investor buying into a tech fund at the height of the Internet bubble in 2000 and then selling a few years later just before the sector revived along with such stocks as Google and Apple.
Investors in target-date funds, at least so far, seem to have avoided this curse. They’ve been sticking with their funds and doing surprisingly well in the process.
On average, target-date fund investors are doing 1.1 percent better per year than their funds. Investors in almost every other fund category lagged their funds over the past decade, including a -0.98 percent underperformance for U.S. equity funds and -1.3 percent for municipal bond funds.

View gallery

Bloomberg

Does this vindicate target-date funds? Not so fast. It’s possible the performance of target-date investors is a historical accident, caused by the funds’ growing popularity during a six-year bull market for stocks. The next time markets hit 2008-style turbulence, these investors may bail out of target-date funds, selling at the wrong time just as they panicked over their stock funds six years ago.
Another worry about target-date funds is their fees. Target-date funds charged investors 0.78 percent in fees last year, Morningstar says. That’s down from an expense ratio of 1.04 percent in 2008. But it’s still a drag on performance, with some investors paying three or four times more than others. Vanguard’s target-date funds charge 0.17 percent per year, and new funds from State Street and Pacific Investment Management Co. (Pimco) charge less than 0.3 percent. But meanwhile, more than a dozen target-date fund series still charge 1 percent or even higher.
Target-date funds may prove to be a valuable tool, but only at a reasonable price.

Culled from Bloomberg.com

Eurozone hopes Greek criticism will bear fruit-Pan Pylas and David Keyton

RIGA, Latvia (AP) — Greece's European creditors expressed the hope Saturday that the criticism the country's finance minister faced over his failure to present an economic reform plan on time will prompt a positive response soon.

In the Latvian capital of Riga, the eurozone's top official, Jeroen Dijsselbloem, said he hopes "some extra urgency" will be injected into the process following the "critical" meeting of the eurozone's 19 finance ministers the day before. Greece's Yanis Varoufakis was rebuked for failing to come up with a list of economic reforms.
"But it is going to take a couple of days at least," Dijsselbloem said.
Just two months ago, Greece secured an agreement from the eurozone to get the remaining money in its bailout fund — 7.2 billion euros ($7.7 billion) — but only if it came up with a mutually agreed set of reforms.
But with days to go, Athens has yet to present a full list, prompting Friday's criticism of Varoufakis and the effective abandonment of the deadline. His peers spoke of being "tired" and "annoyed" with the way the talks are going.
On Saturday, as they arrived for talks with their non-euro partners in the 28-country European Union, finance ministers sought to downplay talk of a Greek debt default and the country's exit from the euro.
"Yesterday, we spoke of an A plan, of 'the' plan, because there is no plan B, C, D, or E," said French Finance Minister Michel Sapin. "There is only one plan, and that's Greece in the euro, Greece in Europe."
Though acknowledging the "anxiety" among his peers, Greece's Varoufakis has sought to portray the discussions in a more positive light, noting progress on issues such as privatization, reforming the tax system, the judiciary, the bureaucracy and product markets.
Varoufakis said the main sticking points related to pensions and the level of the budget surplus Athens has to post after debt and interest payments are stripped out — a higher level would effectively mean the government has less money to spend on its priorities.
All sides agree that the clock is ticking. The next possible date for a deal could be May 11, when eurozone finance ministers will meet next and just one day before Greece owes a big payment to the IMF.
"We should move faster, because time is running out, financial difficulties are there as well as the commitments made," said Pierre Moscovici, the European Union's top economic official.

View gallery

Eurogroup president Jeroen Dijsselbloem participates in the Informal Meeting of Ministers for Econom …

Greece has relied on 240 billion euros in bailout loans since May 2010 after it was effectively locked out of international bond markets amid concerns it was insolvent.
In return for the cash, successive governments have had to make savage spending cuts and economic reforms. But while the measures have focused on improving public finances, they have also hurt the economy and caused unemployment to skyrocket.
The current government was elected in January on a promise to end such so-called austerity. Its focus is on fighting corruption, reforming the public sector, and improving the porous tax system.
The prevailing view in markets is that a deal will be reached in time to avoid a Greek debt default, but only when the pressure on the country becomes unbearable — for example, when the government is out of money to pay its debts or the banks start seeing deposits running dry due to withdrawals by worried savers.
The decision this week by the Greek government to scrape together spare cash from municipalities and state enterprises like hospitals and the national gallery is likely to buy some time. The move — which Greek lawmakers formally approved in a vote late Friday — could, according to independent estimates, rake in 2 billion euros ($2.14 billion), which would cover its debt payments in May.

Culled from AP