What’s inside? Here are the questions answered in today’s reader mailbag, boiled down to five word summaries. Click on the number to jump straight down to the question.
1. Strange credit card fee
2. Handling sudden income increase
3. Great job, next financial move?
4. Children’s movies
5. Keeping papers
6. Determining ownership percentages

I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. – Thomas Jefferson

Thanks to William Grootonk for the image.

There is a scene in the Parable of the Talents in which the returned master berates the shabbiest of his three servants. Discovering that he had buried his seed capital in the ground, the master says: “You should have put my money on deposit with the bankers, so that when I returned I would have received it back with interest.” The servant is then thrown outside “into the darkness,” where he faces “weeping and gnashing of teeth.”

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a person in want of a good fortune must be in possession of an emergency fund. Hilarious literary allusions aside, the emergency fund — or rainy-day savings, or whatever you want to call it — is one of the bedrocks of basic personal finance.

Not much has changed in the last 24 hours. Yesterday, stocks tested the downside but they rebounded throughout the day. Trading volumes are declining and we can expect a narrow range today. The ECB released its bank loan information yesterday and European banks borrowed €498 billion in the last 2 weeks. Most used the cheap 1% funds to pay off higher rate loans and some used the proceeds to buy short-term sovereign debt. Some of the bigger banks in Spain drew enough to cover their refinancing needs in 2012.