Voila! Facing empty shelves, homeowners are skipping the collecting in favor of paying consultants for a quickly stocked cellar. Plus, a look at some of the services available to oenophiles.

ADMIN: The DIY oenophile stocks his wine cellar with homemade wine.

Compare credit card rates to find a 0% interest offer. Swap your high intererest credit card balances to save serious cash. This whole thing works only if you do not use the credit card that you swapped the balance from.

A reverse mortgage can help ease your finances after you retire, or it could cost you and your heirs a lot of money. Long weighed down by high fees and complexities, these loans are now coming in for a cost-saving makeover.

Consumers may never find that altruistic lender. But there are ways to shop for a loan without getting fooled by salespeople who are more concerned about commissions than clients.

FICO scores range from about 300 to 850 and exhibit a left-skewed distribution with a US median around 723. A score above 720 is considered to be “good credit,” and a score below 620 is considered to be sub-prime credit. Higher FICO Scores = Lower Monthly Payments A difference of 3% for the average $150,000 home mortgage could mean more than $100,000 in extra interest to the sub-prime borrower over the life of the loan.

Personal finance resource: credit score, credit cards, reverse mortgages.

Lots of good links and interesting stories here.

The chart is prices of the 30 year US Treasury bond. The 30 year bond is no longer issued but it is still traded and is a very good indicator of the direction of long term interest rates, like fixed-rate residential mortgages.

Although the long term trend remains down for bond prices and higher for interest rates, the immediate short-term trend is for long term interest rates to remain stable or move down over the next few days or weeks.