A Bloomfield Hills woman is accused of embezzling at least $70,000 from an elderly veteran with physical and mental ailments.

Margaret Risdon, 60, is scheduled to appear in 48th District Court later this week for a probable cause conference.

She faces three felony charges – one for embezzlement and two for failure to file tax returns.

If convicted, she could spend more than a decade behind bars.

The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs tapped Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel after the veteran raised concerns that someone was stealing his money.

Investigators say Risdon wrote checks totaling nearly $56,800 from the veteran’s bank account to herself and her business, Electronic Creations, between fall 2016 and summer 2017.

They said she deposited the checks into her bank account before withdrawing the money in cash amounts.

Alannah NicPhaidin, a consultant in international trade compliance who lives in Aurora, Colo., has become an accidental adviser to her friends. She loves crunching numbers and reviewing investments, and eagerly shares her experience. “It made me realize the importance of financial security, particularly for women — particularly making sure you have that protection for yourself,” she said.

Questions from friends tend to crop up when Ms. NicPhaidin, 32, declines invitations to expensive outings — if she can’t afford them, she isn’t shy about saying so, which often prompts a discussion about saving and investing. If her friends are still interested, she helps them scour their financial statements, showing them the kinds of accounts she herself has set up for automatic investing.

Ms. NicPhaidin tries to make the conversation more palatable by serving wine or chocolates before getting into the spreadsheets. “If you’re excited about providing them with their financial security, and you’re able to show how you needed it and what it could do for them in the future, then they get pretty excited too,” Ms. NicPhaidin said. “And it doesn’t just have to be some boring thing of some old guy telling you, ‘You have to budget better.’”

Helping her friends feels personal. When she was 9, Ms. NicPhaidin said, she saw her mother struggle as a single parent after the two emigrated from Ireland with nothing more than one suitcase of clothes and one suitcase of teddy bears to start a new life in Florida. She remembers the hardships they encountered from her mother’s irregular income and how her paltry paycheck sometimes meant eating food discarded by their local supermarket.

Ms. NicPhaidin said she never wanted to experience that kind of financial insecurity again. Now, she saves 65 percent of her income, fueled by a frugality that began after she got her first job as a grocery bagger at Winn Dixie at age 14.

“I would get my paycheck and most kids would be like, ‘I’m going to the mall, I’m going to do this,’” she said. “And every paycheck was cashed and put into an envelope and not looked at again, and then if I was feeling stressed I would count it and go, ‘Oh I have a little bit more,’ so it was a kind of way to make sure that there was security.”

Ms. NicPhaidin’s enthusiasm for saving and investing was hard to resist for Juliet Swanson, a landscape designer in her mid-20s from Falls Church, Va., who says Ms. NicPhaidin helped her turn her finances around.

Representative Tim Ryan has proposed the Emergency Money for the People Act to provide monthly stimulus payments to Americans for 12 months in response to the coronavirus pandemic. This proposal would provide payment to both U.S. citizens and individuals who are not citizens or residents but have been physically present in the U.S. since Jan. 27, 2020.

Individuals would receive $2,000 each month, and married couples filing joint returns would receive $4,000 each month. Each dependent child would receive $500, for up to three children.

Use this calculator to see if you could qualify for the next round of stimulus payments if the Emergency Money for the People Act is passed into law.

Related: Second Stimulus Check Proposals Calculator

Second Stimulus Check Calculator: Emergency Money for the People Act

Other Proposals

Second Stimulus Check Calculator: $40K Income Cap Proposal

Second Stimulus Check Calculator: The HEROES Act Proposal

Second Stimulus Check Calculator: Monthly Economic Crisis Support Act

Frequently Asked Questions

Is the Emergency Money for the People Act a current law?

No, this is just a proposal. There is talk amongst lawmakers to provide an additional round of stimulus payments to Americans, but those proposals vary. This calculator was created based upon information found in the Emergency Money for the People Act proposal.

How much will each person receive?

It depends on income and filing status. Individuals would receive $2,000 each month, and married couples filing joint returns would receive $4,000 each month. Each dependent child would receive $500, up to three children.

Will everybody receive these payments?

No, although the income threshold amounts for the Emergency Money for the People Act are high compared to other proposals. The adjusted gross income maximum for individuals is $130,000 and for married couples filing jointly $260,000. The payment amount will decrease by 5% for each $1,000 over those amounts.

Will I have to pay taxes on these payments?

No. Previous stimulus payments have not been taxed and it’s unlikely for these to be taxed, too.

Fintech today is dominated by consumer tech platforms looking to reinvent financial services. Even in-spite of the reported slowdown in fintech financing activity, founders in the space still raised $8.3 billion in Q2 2020. A common criticism of these startups – neobanks, marketplaces, lenders – is that they provide the same undifferentiated products already available offline, but with a better user interface.

To really understand the value of consumer fintech, though, we need to view these platforms as the fundamental building blocks for autonomous finance, which will reshape how we interact with money.

The premise of autonomous finance is that your finances should be ‘self driving’: you set the destination, and the platform figures out how to get there quickly and safely. Some elements of this exist today: roboadvisors like Wealthfront or Betterment ask questions about your age, risk tolerance, and investment goals before creating and managing plans for you. But the potential for self-driving money (a term coined by Wealthfront) is much, much bigger.

Today we manage our finances through ‘specialist’ services. We may bank with Citi, split the bill with Venmo, invest with Vanguard, trade with Cash App, and pay down student loans with SoFi. These fintech platforms have two features: the decisions are manual and the services are gated. To truly shift the paradigm, we need to integrate these services and automate them.

The first step to autonomous finance is breaking down the barriers between these products. Open banking solutions like Plaid, which link fintechs and banks together, have made it easier to transfer money and data between platforms. Today, that looks like a hub-and-spoke model: I can move money from Venmo to my checking account to Vanguard. In the future, it will be point-to-point: I should be able to take $400 at-rest in Venmo and invest it directly into my Roth IRA, or split it 50/50 between my student loan payments and my credit card bill. Self-driving money limited to one app is like a self-driving car that only works on one road.

The second step is where the ‘autonomous’ part comes in. Connected fintech services will use a combination of common-language rules set by the user and machine learning to manage money in the background. This goes a step beyond setting a retirement goal on a roboadvisor: I should be able to say “whenever I have spare money laying around, other than what I need for day-to-day expenses, reinvest it into whatever earns the highest return.”

After that, I should never have to think about what’s happening with my money, other than when I receive updates from the service on how it is being put to work. In the background, the platform would ingest data from different services, identify where my finances could be optimized, and automatically reallocate it.

This shift would abstract away the notion of ‘specialist’ apps entirely: money would become a natively integrated part of how we move through the world.

But this requires more than just creating a ‘virtual private banker.’ As futurist Brett King notes, this kind of paradigm change requires first principles design-thinking. That means when you get a parking ticket, it gets paid automatically. If you need something from the corner store, you pay with your fingerprint and the autonomous finance platform decides whether to use your credit card or checking account (and uses the credit card with the highest rewards). When you save for your daughter to go to college, the money continuously goes to the 529 Plan with the highest yield and lowest fees.

Self-driving money is still in its infancy. But as Anish Acharya notes, startups like Atomic, Astra, and Canopy are already starting to build gateless, autonomous fintech products. When they arrive, the future of money will look very little like the past.

The coronavirus pandemic is far from over in the U.S., but already, it has left millions struggling as they lost their jobs due to repeated lockdowns. When times are rough, it is difficult to think straight and to add to our worries by trying to change our spending habits, on top of everything. But it’s important to adapt so you can survive through the crisis, so here are financial movements you should do or shouldn’t.

Entertainment in the COVID-19 Days

Who would have thought entertainment could be so important in our lives? Of course, we all like to go out, watch a movie, catch a play or head to a restaurant and go dancing afterwards. But if you were told that you weren’t going out on a given night, you wouldn’t have felt like you were missing out. However, the lockdown has created something new inside each of us, which has become as crucial to our survival as much as the money coming in: Being entertained.

When you can go outside your house, you rapidly lose track of what life is. Without working hours to be kept, the days rapidly mix one within the other. Entertainment becomes a way to either forget the confinement and refresh your head or for couples and family, a moment to share which brings normality to an uneasy situation. That is why Netflix was probably the most important company during the crisis, with millions of viewers around the world, evading to other worlds.

But you also need your time alone with entertainment and nothing is as helpful as music to soothe your soul. That is why Tidal, a music streaming app, was one of the most used during the lockdown as well. With over 60 million tracks and 250,000 videos, it provided a way out to be enjoyed alone or even with the other members of the family for an evening of dancing. Thanks to couponbox.com, you can obtain a reduction on the cost of the membership at Tidal but also on many different items like restaurants, a night at the hotel and clothes. That way, when you feel the urgent need to order out or do a little shopping, you can still save some money while doing so. Which brings us back to: How can you save money during these difficult times?

Defining what is necessary and what isn’t

This is probably the most difficult question you will face during this crisis. Why? Because needs can differ greatly from one person to another. That is, of course, until you need to reduce your spending to the bear minimum. Let’s hope this whole situation will resolve itself before any of us gets to that point.

However, there is no doubt that some habits will have to be changed for everyone facing difficult times on the horizon, after having been laid off temporarily or permanently for others. The problem is that we don’t know when companies will start hiring again, so it is better to save as much as we can in the meantime.

When defining what is necessary for you, make a list of all the extras you pay during a week (don’t write down monthly bills like electricity, loan or rent and other utility bill. Gas for the car, which would normally be one of the necessary spendings, may not be right now, if you don’t have to go to work. Once you have made the list, which should include things like cinema, restaurants, Netflix, golf, a day at the spa, etc., then you will have to start looking into what you are ok to live without.

Reduce Costs, Including Bills Whenever Possible

There are things you should permit yourself to do in crisis which you should never do otherwise. One of them is lower your payment on your credit card. It is essential for a healthy lifestyle to be able to pay your credit card balance in full every month. If you don’t, that clearly means you are spending too much and there will come a time where you won’t be able to get out of this debt. But in a period of crisis, that is one of the bills you can cut by simply paying the minimum amount. However, be aware that you are doing so and that this situation is only temporary, or else you will find yourself in trouble. Then, go through your budget and try to find other bills on which you can temporarily pay less or simply stop for the duration of the crisis.

Reduce Your Savings Input

The best-balanced families usually have an amount of money they consider as savings for each pay check that comes in. That helps you build an emergency fund for times… just like the ones you are currently living. Don’t try to be mightier than you can be about savings. Of course you won’t be able to add to your savings (since you won’t be receiving pay checks anymore) but don’t stop yourself from using that money, because you believe it is not meant to be spent. It is exactly what it is meant to do: protect you in times of difficulties. Of course, manage it wisely so that you don’t find yourself spending it all. The fact that you have it doesn’t mean that you can continue your normal life as if you were employed.

Lower Your Pride and Get help from your Community When it Is Offered

Community help is not always for other people then you. Hardship can happen to anyone, and you should not let your pride get in the way of accepting the help which is so graciously offered. Not all communities have this chance, so if you are part of one that provides it, accept it. To learn about the help which exists around you, call 2-1-1 or go to 211.org. The services they offer can be quite varied, from food banks, to meals for students and seniors and even psychological health for those who are suffering mentally from the pressure they are being put through.

There is also some relief that is being brought by the Federal government such as the postponement of federal student loan payments as well as coronavirus-specific unemployment programs. If you don’t take the time to learn about them, you may be spending money you shouldn’t have to or are not receiving some to which you are entitled.

Find a high savings rate

Now, is the perfect time for you to be proactive in looking for a better saving rate. It is easy to open a high-yield saving account today, in an online bank, which can get you more than the 0.06% average currently being given out (on average). Some even go above 1%. This is the simplest way you will find to earn more money from the one you already have and do so in a matter of minutes.

Conclusion

No matter what you do, keep a tab on how much money you are taking out of your saving accounts. The last thing you want is to find yourself having to rebuild it all once the crisis is gone. Yes, it is there to protect you and to enable you to survive such a crisis, but the more remains on your bank account and the easiest it will be to rebuild it when you go back to work.

To summarize — using Tally is saving our testers money in the long run, as they went from paying interest rates in the teens to paying 11 percent interest on most of their debt. The app is also streamlining their two monthly payments into one, so they just have to navigate the Tally app, which makes sure all payments are made on time, minimizing fees and penalties.

ALEXANDRIA, La. (KALB) – The coronavirus pandemic has forced many Americans to make tough decisions as overdue bills pile up,

This could be a troubling time for college students as many leave home and manage their finances alone for the first time.

Nathan Grant, Senior Credit Industry Analyst with credit card insider says college students need to watch what they spend especially during times like these.

“Avoid making any purchases that are unnecessary during the pandemic so every dollar can stop you from feeling the economic impact of a crisis like this,” Grant said.

Grant says you should have savings for at least three months worth of expense and monitor your bill balances. He says one of the worst things you can do is overuse a credit card.

“Keep all of your balances paid down in full,” he said. “Your credit utilization is the amount of credit being used so the lower that is, the better.”

Grant says college could be the prime opportunity for students establish credit. He says secure credit cards are a good route for those without credit history.

“A secure credit card requires a refundable security deposit that funds the card upon your approval,” he said.

The secure card uses the money used for the deposit for purchases to prevent someone from overspending. Another option is becoming an authorize user on someone’s account, but that carries it’s own risk. If the account holder doesn’t pay their bill, it can negatively impact your score.

Grant says the golden rule is making sure all of your balances are paid in full.

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Ever thought of volunteering but unsure of how to start? For Clare Tong, it was a simple Internet search that allowed her to cultivate this passion.

“Since secondary school, I’ve participated in Community Involvement Projects where I had the chance to meet people from all walks of life and witness firsthand segments of society that could really use more support.”

Seeing how her actions could truly make a difference in someone’s life, Clare was motivated to give back to the community even beyond her student years.

After graduating with an economics degree, Clare decided to use her new-found knowledge for the greater good.

It was then that she discovered Aidha online, a local charity that provides financial literacy and self-development skills to foreign domestic workers and lower-income women to enable them and their families to break out of the cycle of poverty.

“I think it’s important to identify a few causes that you’re interested in or have skill sets in so that you will be more committed in your volunteering journey.”

Aidha’s vision to build lifelong skills for foreign domestic workers (FDWs) to ensure sustainable financial empowerment resonated with Clare and this eventually persuaded to join the non-profit organisation as a volunteer mentor, on top of her day job as a data analyst.

“As a mentor, I take on a class of 10-20 students for a particular module that lasts 6 months,” Clare explains.

Classes follow a structured class curriculum designed by Aidha but ultimately, her role is to support the women in their learning journeys while also strengthening her own speaking skills.

Many of the FDWs arrive in Singapore at a young age, leaving behind their families, children and partners. It is therefore inevitable that many are often not exposed to adequate financial or holistic education.

Coupled with the pressure from work and their family back at home who may have certain financial demands, many of these women unfortunately accumulate little savings despite toiling for many years here in Singapore.

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Despite the hardships her students face, Clare never fails to be inspired by their resilience. She internalises it as motivation to become better herself.

“Some of them may have failed businesses or difficult family backgrounds, but still they do not give up. These women are choosing to spend the one free day of their week to travel all the way to school to learn, out of their genuine desire to improve their lives.

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Whether it’s teaching FDWs to manage their money through financial planning and informed decision-making, to starting a business, Clare is grateful in the knowledge that the lessons being imparted upon these women can help them to secure a brighter future.

She recommends checking out websites such as www.giving.sg or www.volunteer.sg as there are many curated opportunities listed that can help you kickstart your own volunteer journey.

“Talk to the organisation, current and previous volunteers or attend introductory sessions without feeling the need to commit yet. It’s never late to lend someone a helping hand.”

For more information on Aidha, click here.

This article was first published in Wonderwall.sg.