An employee for Japanese toy maker Sega Toys displays the world’s smallest “Grand Pianist - Hello Kitty Version”, which has 88 working keys and can automatically play 115 pre-installed musical songs, including 15 Hello Kitty related pieces. The original version of the Grand Pianist started selling in Japan in April and the new white Hello Kitty version will be put on the market next month.

Eighty-eight days to go before Christmas! Many of us scrimp and save the whole year, only to lose it all in December. Parents go crazy buying the best Christmas gifts and serving the best Christmas dinners, mostly to assuage our own guilt when we feel we haven’t spent much time with our kids the rest of the year! I’m guilty here too hehe.

If we wait until December to decide on a limit for Christmas spending, it’s easy to be swayed by great commercials and amazing packaging. Hubby and I used to have a “skies the limit” attitude when it comes to getting gifts for the kiddos, but lately, we have decided as a family to lie low on consumerism and focus on what’s really important – family, togetherness, and of course a gift that doesn’t take away the spirit of what we actually celebrate on Christmas time.

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Sorry guys, the company policy does not allow posting of personal information in INQUIRER.net blogs. This is for your protection . Although I would like to think we are a close-knit community here in MoneySmarts, I know for sure that there are fraudsters out there ready to pounce on loyal readers. So be careful!

If you want to contact anyone, shoot me an email at lightdream@gmail.com (*I’m* used to spam) and I will see how I can help.

A reader asked a very interesting question from INQUIRER.net and James Lago of Westlink Global Equities Inc. gave a very interesting reply:

I am writing for my cousin whose wife inherited some NYSE-issued PLDT and NY Steamboat Company stocks from her mother who died in a house fire in Las Pinas about five years ago. It was said that her mother laid on the stocks as the house was burning to protect it, so that the stock certificates edges are burned but they are still readable and intact. The stocks were bought in NY in the 80s. I contacted the NYSE who told me to contact a NY broker. My questions are:

1. Can the PLDT stocks be claimed locally? If yes where and how?
2. Do they need a lawyer to prove the wife is the heir? I am afraid the lawyer and broker fees may be worth more than the stocks whose face value when bought I think were just about $300.
3. Is there a way for us to determine via the internet how much the stocks are worth now?

Read the rest of the article here.

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If you’ve been reading about the foreign exchange markets long enough, you know that forecasting where the peso will end up, say, at the end of the year is futile. I daresay the foreign exchange markets is as fickle, or even more so, than the lady next to you and as temperamental as the toddler next door!

During the height of the Asian financial crisis in 1997 when the peso-dollar rate was the staple story in business pages, I spent so much time tracking the foreign exchange markets that one night, I woke up after a nightmare mumbling “The peso! The peso!”

That can happen to you when you wait for hours until late at night sprawled on the floors of the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas just to get first crack at what the Monetary Board members talked about.

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Is there a better way to ask your parents if they are doing okay financially? The timing of our content partner’s article “Probing your parents’ finances” could not be better because just the other day, I agonized over how to ask my mother how she is handling her credit card debt.

Fortunately, my mother is very smart and she takes advice from a very control-freak daughter gracefully (which is so much more than what I can say about myself taking advice from someone else!). Besides, it appears that my 70-ish mother is a financial wiz! (Yey!)

Many of my friends, however, are also wondering how to find a way to get their parents to open up so they can help before it is too late. It really is a diplomatic dance, so goes one article. They could shut the door on your face forever if your tone of voice doesn’t sit well with them. There is also the greater question of whether you can handle the additional financial burden of helping out your aging parents.

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Sexy mutual fund returns are a sure way of getting most people’s attention. With the recent turbulence in the equities market, however, many realize that it’s also important to look at how often a fund outperforms the index, and not just by how much.

Of course, the sweetest thing would be to find a fund that outperforms with great returns all the time! But perhaps that’s like looking for that dream girl or boy. :-)

Read my article on how to look for a mutual fund you can count on here.

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Reader Mike wanted to know:

Where and how do I get corporate bonds? Are they available in small amounts e.g. P5000 like RTBs (retail treasury bonds)?

There’s a great website called AsianBonds Online that gives at-a-glance information on investing in bonds.

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Sure, you can get rich with a big inheritance from a great aunt you don’t really know. The source of real financial independence, however, comes from the little money decisions we make regularly.

This article from Lucena City, courtesy of the Philippine Daily Inquirer’s Southern Luzon Bureau, says volumes:

LUCENA CITY – Schoolchildren in northern Quezon towns are contributing a few pesos of their daily cash allowance to help fund a campaign against government dam projects in the Sierra Madre mountain rivers and avert a possible environmental disaster.

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Let’s get one thing out of the way. Saving and investing are not the same, although they are both important and part of the same spectrum. Sometimes, we feel like we are investing, when actually we are still in the saving stage. Getting mixed-up over the two raises expectations that are not unrealistic.

This list of options in the Philippine setting is not by any means exhaustive. It includes the major savings and investment instruments. Where would you draw the line to separate the savings from investment products?

1. Cash. Yep, I just learned last weekend that some Filipinos still prefer to keep their money in cash at home, fearful even of the possibility that they will lose money deposited in banks.

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I’ve been hearing this advice from a lot of people lately: Get out of the dollar. Put your money in pesos, euros, Canadian dollars and other currencies.

This begs the question: Is the dollar a doomed currency?

After the Fed rate cut, investors rallied towards the peso, causing it to gain a surprising half a peso in just one day. [Read the rest of this entry »]