Investment Choices

Lately, more and more seniors are hearing about opportunities to sell their existing life insurance for cash in transactions known as life settlements. A life settlement, sometimes called a "senior settlement," involves selling an existing life insurance policy to a third party—a person or an entity other than the company that issued the policy—for more than the policy’s cash surrender value, but less than the net death benefit.

Life settlements can be a valuable source of liquidity for people who would otherwise surrender their policies or allow them to lapse—or for people whose life insurance needs have changed. But they are not for everyone. Life settlements can have high transaction costs and unintended consequences. And even if you decide a life settlement is generally right for you, it can be hard to tell whether you are getting a fair price.

Read the Alert

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Find Your State’s Insurance Commission. Your state insurance department is often your best source for information on company and agent licensing requirements, products and other insurance issues. To locate your state’s securities commission use this map.

Arbitration and Mediation

NASD Unveils Free Arbitration Awards Online Database

NASD unveiled its newly developed NASD Arbitration Awards Online database. The database's enhanced search capability enables users to search for awards by case number, by keywords within awards, by arbitrator names, by date ranges set by the user and by any combination of those features. Arbitration Awards from January 1989 through the present will be available in the new database. Searches are free, unlimited, quick and simple. Arbitration awards can be viewed online, printed or downloaded as text-searchable PDF files. The awards will be posted to the site within a week of being served on the parties.

The new Arbitration Awards Online system can be accessed at www.nasd.com, through the Get Arbitration Awards link.

Are you considering initiating an arbitration or mediation claim? Learn more on the NASD Web site.

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Investor Education

Turning 70½ in 2007?

If you are, the law requires that you begin to withdraw money from your traditional IRA, 401(k) or other employer sponsored retirement plan by April 1 of the year after you turn 70½. While you can always withdraw more, the amount you must withdraw each year is called a minimum required distribution (MRD). If you take less than the required minimum, you owe a 50% penalty on the amount you should have withdrawn. To find out what your required withdrawal will be and the rate of return you'll need to earn to maintain your account balance, use our Minimum Required Distributions Calculator.

Phishing Continues to Hook Victims

According to a recent survey from Gartner Research, phishing remains a serious risk to investors. "Phishing" is a scam that uses spam email to lure you into revealing your bank or brokerage account information, passwords or PINs, Social Security number, or other types of confidential information.

The volume of phishing emails increased in 2006 to 109 million, up from 57 million in 2004. Phishing attacks resulted in financial losses of more than $2.8 billion in 2006. While fewer people lost money, those who did take the bait lost considerably more than in years past, an average of $1,244 in 2006, compared to $257 in 2004. Read NASD's Investor Alert: "Phishing" and Other Online Identity Theft Scams: Don't Take the Bait.

Tools You Can Use

Questions? Search our FAQ database.

NASD’s Web site delivers relevant answers to plain English questions 24/7. Once on the NASD FAQ home page, you can:

view our top ten most popular frequently asked questions;
perform natural language and key word search of our database;
browse frequently asked questions by topic or category.

If you don't find an answer, use the "Ask an Expert" link within any FAQ and the system automatically routes new questions to the right subject matter expert, who will provide responses via email.

Past Issues of Investor News Available

In response to numerous requests, previous issues of Investor News are now available on our Web site.

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