Being a single mother in the US is quite a challenge

When you're the single parent of an only child, you want only the best possible life for your kid. That's how Jacqui Sentmanat feels. But it's an expensive proposition.

It already cost the 42-year-old Houston accountant $20,000 to get pregnant through fertility treatments and to take time off work to be with her daughter early on. This nearly drained her emergency savings. She has since replenished the funds, but now she faces a quandary: how to invest for her retirement while tackling her daughter's long-term needs.

For starters, Sentmanat wants to send Franqui, 3, to private school. She has already paid the $8,200-a-year tuition for preschool. That's on top of the $5,500 a year she'll have to shell out for after-school and summer care. And when Franqui gets to high school, annual tuition costs will likely soar above $10,000. Then there's college to worry about. With public schools costing more than $16,000 a year, it's easy to see how saving for Franqui could eclipse any hope of a regular retirement for Sentmanat.

She knows her retirement is important, but she really wants Franqui to be able to graduate without student loans. "This isn't just about freedom for me in retirement," she says, "but freedom for her from debt."

Happy buyers are taking advantage of the financial situation of our country

With such an economical state like the one in which we are living now, it is quite normal that we see many desesperate sellers trying to clear their debts and so even th rock-bottom price just isn't enough for buyers these days - it's a starting point. If the furnace is out of date, they'll demand a new one. Cracked driveways have to be repaved, and dirty carpeting torn out and replaced. All at the seller's expense.

Buyers are in the driver's seat and they know it. They're using that leverage to pry more concessions out of desperate sellers than they ever dreamed of during the bubble.

"'Now it's my turn,' is the attitude," said Mike Byrd, a real estate agent with SLO Home Store in San Luis Obispo, Calif. "Some buyers are really putting the screws on."

In New England, buyers are demanding that sellers pay to fill up a home's heating oil tank. In California, sellers are forking over closing costs. Nearly everywhere, buyers are insisting that sellers purchase a home service contract providing a one year warranty on all of a home's appliances.

New central air-conditioning systems, a year of condo association fees and even two weeks in Hawaii are just a few of the incentives that sellers are having to employ these days, according to Byrd.

And buyers are getting it all in writing.

"[During the boom] buyers usually accepted the property as-is, and we even occasionally offered to pay the seller's state and county transfer taxes," said Washington D.C. based agent John Sullivan, who is also president elect of the National Association of Exclusive Buyer's Agents. "No more."

Expected financial growth outside the US...

As you know, it seems that this year dollar has just made it impossible for the USA to continue to grow as they used to in the past few years and keeping that in mind, the growth in many other foreign countries can really be surprising... In fact, Japan will grow by just 1.2%, down from June's 1.7% forecast, the OECD said, predicting the country will avoid recession with a partial bounceback in the second half.

The 15-nation euro zone is set to grow at a 1.3% clip, compared with 1.7% forecast in June. Major economies Germany, France and Italy, which like Japan all shrank in the second quarter, should also avoid recession defined as two consecutive quarters of negative growth, according to the centerpoint of the projections.

However the OECD's chief economist Jorgen Elmeskov said the "relatively wide" range of the forecasts indicates a risk that all four economies could shrink again in the current quarter.

The British economy, which is expected to chart 1.2% growth this year, could be entering a recession with growth expected to shrink in the third and fourth quarters, the OECD's central projections show.

"The picture for the major economies is for a pretty weak second half," Elmeskov told reporters at a Paris news conference.

US economy is shwoing signs of recovery

Even though it may seem that all the signs that we use to see on Tv and newspapers may tell us that our economy is not as financially healthy as it should, the truth is that the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development on Tuesday lowered its forecast for economic growth in the major European economies and Japan and raised its expectations for the United States, which it predicted will grow at the fastest pace of all G-7 economies.

The Paris-based international agency said tax cuts in the U.S., combined with strong exports, caused it to revise its expectation for economic growth to 1.8% this year, faster than the 1.2% forecast in June.