CHICAGO (Reuters) – Artists are not renowned for financial savvy, but their success in raising money on the Internet through donations to crowdfunding websites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo could lead the way for a new class of investing. Soon investors will be able to pile money into startups through such sites with the hope of getting more than a lousy t-shirt in return.

Before April 5, U.S. regulators only allowed donation-based crowdfunding projects, which raise money from the general public via the Web.

While businesses have used such sites to get working capital, they have generally taken preorders for yet-to-be-created merchandise instead of selling equity. But new possibilities are opening up because of the Jumpstart Our Business Startups, or JOBS, Act, which President Obama signed into law last month.

The act provides crowdfunded businesses and investors with exemptions to the Securities Act of 1933, which prohibited people with a net worth below $1 million from investing in private companies. For the first time, businesses can advertise for investors without filing the standard disclosures required of companies with more than $1 billion in revenue.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission still has 270 days from the JOBS Act signing to review and make final changes to its regulation, but if the statutes stay in effect as-is, just about anyone will be able to invest in a startup or small company.

“What’s new is being able to offer equity in return,” says Slava Rubin, chief executive officer and co-founder of major crowdfunding site Indiegogo.

“And it’s just the beginning,” said Rubin, whose site has helped fund more than 5,000 projects since he unveiled it at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2008. “We’re talking about a law that hasn’t changed in 79 years.”

CHICAGO, May 23 (Reuters) – Artists are not renowned for financial savvy, but their success in raising money on the Internet through donations to crowdfunding websites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo could lead the way for a new class of investing. Soon investors will be able to pile money into startups through such sites with the hope of getting more than a lousy t-shirt in return.

Before April 5, U.S. regulators only allowed donation-based crowdfunding projects, which raise money from the general public via the Web.

While businesses have used such sites to get working capital, they have generally taken preorders for yet-to-be-created merchandise instead of selling equity. But new possibilities are opening up because of the Jumpstart Our Business Startups, or JOBS, Act, which President Obama signed into law last month.

The act provides crowdfunded businesses and investors with exemptions to the Securities Act of 1933, which prohibited people with a net worth below $1 million from investing in private companies. For the first time, businesses can advertise for investors without filing the standard disclosures required of companies with more than $1 billion in revenue.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission still has 270 days from the JOBS Act signing to review and make final changes to its regulation, but if the statutes stay in effect as-is, just about anyone will be able to invest in a startup or small company.

“What’s new is being able to offer equity in return,” says Slava Rubin, chief executive officer and co-founder of major crowdfunding site Indiegogo.

“And it’s just the beginning,” said Rubin, whose site has helped fund more than 5,000 projects since he unveiled it at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2008. “We’re talking about a law that hasn’t changed in 79 years.”

CHICAGO, May 18 (Reuters) – Mark Zuckerberg may be worth an estimated $19 billion, thanks to Facebook’s initial public offering. But on eBay, he’s worth exactly $375 - that is, if you choose to purchase a “Mark Zuckerberg Poking Inventor Action Figure.”

Zuck’s mini-me stands seven inches tall with light brown, curly hair and a doll-sized pair of his trademark Adidas sandals. It’s one of only 300 made and the seller is hyping it as “Just in time for the Facebook IPO.”

Even with 900 million Facebook users, not a single bidder stepped forward with just under eight hours to go in the auction on Friday. M.I.C. Gadget, the seller, on the item description said it released only one run of the bobblehead “due to tremendous pressure from Facebook.”

Even before Zuckerberg rang the bell at the Nasdaq on Friday morning to kick off trading in Facebook’s stock, there’s been a parallel trading universe where collectors and speculators have tried to cash in on the Facebook name. The items available include a Mark Zuckerberg hoodie on San Francisco’s Craigslist, purportedly worn by the Facebook chieftain himself, for $1,000. (How one would verify Zuckerberg’s connection to the item outside of DNA tests or sworn, signed statement from Mr. Facebook is another story.)

Not everyone managed to get in on the buying frenzy for the Facebook IPO, which priced the shares at $38 a pop. But for almost the same exact same price – an opening bid of $35 plus $3.65 shipping – one lucky eBayer could land an original Facebook prospectus for the sale of 337,415,352 shares, and covering some 200 pages. The sole bid was holding up on Friday with five days to go in the auction.

Then there are the fake souvenirs, albeit intentional ones, you can snag for free. Mad Magazine this week posted a bogus Facebook stock certificate, with Zuckerberg’s smiling mug inside an oval dollar-bill frame, with this declaration: “Thank you for funding our ongoing effort to collect and control every single piece of personal information on the Internet. Every photograph, every song, every social cause, every event listing, every opinion, every breathless description of a pulled-pork sandwich. All ours.”

It’s sealed with a thumbs-up icon, too: “The SEC likes this.”

CHICAGO (Reuters) – When Maria Echevarria was considering a job offer as a publicist in midtown Manhattan – more than 900 miles away from her family home in Orlando, Florida – she knew it would be a hard sell to her spouse. Though they’d been happily married more than 20 years, they’d never lived apart. But like any PR maven, she says: “I pitched my story to him.”

Three months turned into three years, with Echevarria, now 53, spending three weeks a month in New York, and telecommuting the remaining time from Florida. She’s one of the many millions of people in a commuter marriage, where spouses live apart for reasons other than legal separation.

“There have always been commuter marriages, since sailors went away to sea,” says Tina B. Tessina, a therapist in Long Beach, California and author of “The Commuter Marriage: Keep Your Relationship Close While You’re Far Apart” (Adams Media). “But in my practice, I’m seeing more and more, prompted by people traveling to get jobs in a tight economy.”

Last year, 3.5 million couples 18 and older were part of a commuter marriage, according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s current population survey. That’s up about 17 percent from 2001, when 3 million couples did it; the number stood at 2.7 million in 2000. What this means for the couples is spending more on travel and housing – as in thousands of dollars more – to come out financially ahead, in part because of the current economy and job market. The Great Recession has forced workers to broaden the geographic boundaries of their job hunt, while selling a home to relocate has become much harder since the real estate downturn.

In the typical commuter marriage, one spouse will rent an apartment in the city where they work, while the other holds down the home front, whether that is an owned or rented property. Airfare also figures in, between the commuting spouse flying back and forth, and the non-commuting spouse making special visits to the commuting city. Echeverria’s husband, for example, comes to New York every few months on business, tweaking his schedule so he can see his wife more often.

Echevarria says that between her flights to Florida and her husband’s trips to New York, they spend more than $500 a month extra. Does she come out ahead financially working in New York? “Absolutely,” she says. “And the way I’m treated at work makes my life a lot easier.”

“People are looking for creative solutions to live the lifestyles they want to live,” says Julie Murphy Casserly, a Chicago-based wealth manager. But she warns that commuter couples also get financial tradeoffs: “the double utilities, the double rent, the double cars and the double everything else.” Couples also have to pay state taxes twice, as non-residents in the state where a spouse works, and residents in the state they legally call home.

CHICAGO (Reuters) – There’s no shortage of advice for new college graduates. Everyone from the commencement speaker to the local bartender (who may have been last year’s commencement speaker) has a strong opinion about what you should do. So much often contradictory advice can cancel itself out.

But what if you could jump ahead a decade or two and ask your future self for straight-to-the-heart graduation guidance? Reuters asked people who had the wisdom of hindsight what advice they wish they had heard on graduation day.

Here’s what they said:

Jeff DeLoach, 23, environmental engineer Dallas, Texas Graduated: B.S., Chemical Engineering, Tennessee Technological University, 2011

Advice: Don’t take no for an answer.

DeLoach dreamed of a career in nuclear propulsion in the U.S. Navy, but a visit to a recruiter left him crushed when he was told he wasn’t Navy material. “Years later I learned that there had been a misunderstanding; the man I interviewed with was unaware of my nuclear ambitions and I was unaware of his ignorance,” DeLoach says. “One of my largest regrets from my college years is my failure to simply ask ‘Why?’ when I was denied entry. Had I been slightly more ambitious at a younger age, the rest of my life could’ve been radically different.”

Lindsay Anderson, 30, publicist New York City Graduated: B.A., Marketing and Communications, Emerson College, 2003

CHICAGO (Reuters) – Think you don’t lie to your kids about money? A typical dishonest scenario is all too common: A parent says “No” to a $10 item, claiming not to have enough money, but then places a $15 trinket in the shopping cart for himself.

“When you say you can’t afford something when you really can, you’re missing the opportunity to talk about priorities or trade-offs,” says Stuart Ritter, a vice president at T. Rowe Price and a father of three. “Kids are perceptive, and I think we underestimate their readiness to learn this stuff, and their ability to pick up on what you and I are doing.”

Ritter, an expert on family financial education, was involved in a study for the company released in late March called the “Parents, Kids & Money Survey.” In this year’s report, the firm set out to interview more than 800 children ages 8 to 14, in addition to 1,008 parents (split evenly between moms and dads).

The Baltimore-based investment firm found, among other things, that parents have just as tough a time talking money with their kids as they do teaching them about sex.

They have such a hard time, in fact, that they lie about or avoid money topics on a regular basis, even though in many cases, their kids know something’s up. One-third of parents reported that they avoid conversations with their children about money.

One of those big avoidance topics is mother-father disagreements on money matters. While 46 percent of parents report this as an issue, 42 percent of kids said they were aware of such conflicts.

What’s more, 77 percent of parents said they aren’t always honest with their kids about money, with 15 percent not telling the truth at least weekly. Most commonly, 43 percent of parents report being dishonest about how worried they are about money, while 32 percent tell kids they can’t afford something when they really can.

CHICAGO (Reuters) – Since T.S. Eliot’s brief career at Lloyds Bank of London, the connections between banking and literature have remained tenuous at best – especially when you narrow the focus to the genre of “banking-related fantasy novel parodies.”

But that did not stop Paul Erickson, a laid-off trainer of tellers and personal bankers for Washington Mutual, from taking an inspired crack at hilarity with “The Wobbit: A Parody.” With the novel, the 52-year-old from Oak Park, Illinois, twists J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Hobbit” in a financial funhouse mirror: the dwarves come courtesy of characters he met while training at a variety of financial institutions, including WaMu.

The bank’s collapse in 2008 constitutes such an epic tale that people still talk about it four years later. “Washington Mutual was the poster child for the banking crisis,” said Richard Barrington, a senior finance analyst for MoneyRates.com. “It was the one that got everybody’s attention – the public and the bank regulators.”

Erickson did not base his Tolkien retake on a blow-by-blow account of the WaMu debacle, “but ‘The Hobbit’ is an allegory, and it’s kind of fitting someone would (find inspiration) in Washington Mutual,” Barrington said. “It was a cautionary tale, and not in abstract way.”

With more than 6,000 e-books in circulation, “The Wobbit” currently ranks 43rd in Amazon.com’s ranking of parodies. But that could soon change with Peter Jackson’s film “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey” due out in December; Erickson hopes to exploit the fortuitous tie-in to the fullest. (Jackson is filming two “Hobbit” movies back-to-back, the second to be released in 2013; Erickson is working on another Tolkien parody: “Superfriends of the Ring.”)

Soon after “The Wobbit” went on Amazon, it caught the attention of Carsten Polzin, an editorial director at Piper Verlag in Munich, Germany. His company now plans to release a German-language edition, and has more ambitious plans for “The Wobbit” as the release of Jackson’s film draws near, including the possible sale of English-language rights in North America and elsewhere.

“I instantly liked Erickson’s style and prose; very funny and yet respectful for Tolkien’s masterpiece,” said Polzin. Nor did the use of bankers as Hobbits throw him. “It’s most impressive how well they fit in to the story. One wonders how Tolkien could’ve done without them.”

CHICAGO (Reuters) – Do accountants do a better job of filing their own taxes?

Ask Elaine Smith, a master tax adviser at H&R Block’s Kansas City office how she’s doing with her own returns this tax season, and she laughs: “What is it they say? The cobbler’s kids always go without shoes. The easiest return to ignore is your own.”

But her colleague Gil Charney, principal researcher at H&R Block’s tax institute in Kansas City, Missouri, dispensed with his federal tax return a month ago and has already pocketed a nice refund.

Charney gets the job done using an elegant and extremely organized system of computerized folders and banking software. “I scan everything I get all year and put it on my Mac,” he says.

Smith’s tax preparation method wasn’t as structured, but, in the run-up to the April 17 filing deadline set by the Internal Revenue Service, she says she’s done a better job than in previous years of tracking charitable deductions, and fine-tuning the W-4s that she and her husband file. Her goal is an even zero on her tax return, indicating no refund or payment.

With more than 700,000 registered tax preparers, there’s no data that shows how many of them file their taxes on time.

But it’s common for them, as a professional hazard, to approach the task of their own taxes with the zeal of archers trying to hit a bull’s eye, says Austin, Texas-based Kay Bell, a tax editor with Bankrate.com, and author of “The Truth About Paying Fewer Taxes.”

CHICAGO (Reuters) – With mortgage rates still hovering near historic lows, this could be the right time to buy a home or refinance a mortgage, but nailing down a low-rate, low-fee loan isn’t that easy.

Winning one of the best deals in the current volatile mortgage market is like shooting a bullseye from a roller coaster, say brokers who are close to the action. Rates are still running under 4 percent for 30-year fixed rate loans, reports Bankrate.com, but they do fluctuate and not all applicants get the best rates. “It’s unpredictable,” says Cathy Milligan, a veteran mortgage broker with Marina Funding Group in Ventura, California. “Some people don’t even know to check around. They just assume that they go to their bank and that they’re going to get the best loan there is.”

But Milligan has seen events as far away as a bond market rout in Europe or a New York selloff in Treasuries affect the rates she can find for her clients. Mortgage rates fluctuate far more than they used to, and there can be a broad range of rates and fees available from different lenders, she says.

That means borrowers have to search wider and work harder to get a good loan at a good rate. And once they find one, they have to be prepared to lock it in.

Here’s some advice from Milligan and other mortgage experts on how to get a good home loan now.

First, obtain your credit score

FICO scores remain the standard by which many mortgage lenders assess a borrower’s creditworthiness, and it now takes a score of 760 or better (on an 850 scale) to get the best rates, according to FICO, the company that created those scores. They are calculated on the basis of information in credit reports, so if you’ve had any credit problems in recent years, it is a good idea to make sure your score is solid before you apply for a loan. You can get your credit reports for free at AnnualCreditReport.com, but you’ll have to pay for your FICO score at MyFico (www.myfico.com).