Financial, Health, and Legal
Financial Planning
These links are provided for research purposes only, and do not constitute endorsement by SFWA.
The American Institute of Certified Public Accountants and its predecessors have been serving the accounting profession since 1887. This site has a useful section on ethics and this listing of state associations for CPAs.
Bernstein Investment Research and Management, a unit of Alliance Capital Management LP, is an asset manager for high-net-worth individuals, has material on REITs, hedge funds, down markets, and a variety of other research information. It's got a good search engine and a good reputation for excellent research.
The Career Recovery writing section here on the SFWA site has some useful thoughts.
Foolscap & Quill has a yearly edition of the Writer's Pocket Tax Guide.
Internal Revenue Service: Forms and publications are available online. Click on individuals, then on self-employed for advice on starting a business, record keeping, self employment taxes, and a small business resource guide
Investopedia.com's Building Blocks for those relatively new to investing.
Moody's Investors Service, one of the premier bond-rating agencies, has good information about credit.
Morningstar rates mutual funds and provides information. Free registration gets you to the good stuff.
The Motley Fool has readily accessible guides to a variety of financial topics.
The Pauper helps artists with the art of money.
Social Security Online should be your first stop for retirement planning.
Suite101 has a business and economics section along with their other offerings.
Stock Indexes
Dow-Jones Indexes develops, maintains and licenses market indexes for use as benchmarks and as the basis of investment products. Among its more than 3,000 indexes are the world's best known stock indicator, the Dow Jones Industrial Average, and the leading Pan- European indexes.
NAREIT contains information about REITs and publicly traded real estate.
Russell maintains 21 U.S. stock indexes and has launched similar broad-market and style indexes in Japan.
S&P Index listing has coverage of the world's major markets.
Health Insurance
These links are provided for research purposes only, and do not constitute endorsement by SFWA.
eHealthInsurance.com enables you to compare and contrast available plans in your zip code.
InsuranceFinder.com is a 100% advertiser supported insurance search engine.
Insure.com has plenty of informational articles, including the handy 13 things your health insurer doesn't want you to know.
Quoteserv.com currently uses the Insurance Finder search engine (3/03), but is developing its own applications and also offers informational articles.
Quotesmith offers insurance quotes and information for a variety of needs.
Legal Resources
These links are provided for research purposes only, and do not constitute endorsement by SFWA.
See also the Reference Section
The American Bar Association has a lot of free content on legal issues, and pointers to other content.
AuthorsLawyer.com is intended to serve authors, and incidentally publishers and agents interested in a pro-author perspective.
Copyright law: an overview from Cornell Law School
Copyright Basics: a reader-friendly discussion of copyright.
FindLaw provides state, national, and international legal resources
Founding Fathers' Documents is an excellent collection of documents like the Federalist Papers, Antifederalist Papers, Articles of Confederation, etc.--all of which are _still referred to_ in some contexts, particularly First Amendment law. Similarly, another site covers the debates at the Constitutional Convention.
Lexis provides free access to Supreme Court decisions since 1790 and other decisions since 1997
Libel Statutes of Limitation is a good general guide to the different statutes of limitation on libel suits in the US.
Martindale-Hubbell is the most-used and probably most-reliable lawyer locator, whether by name, by firm, or by practice area.
The Publishing Law Center has 19 articles on legal issues of concern to publishers, editors and authors. These articles cover contracts, copyright, fair use, public domain, subsidiary rights, electronic rights and more.
University of Texas School of Law--Patents and Trademarks is the most-useful non-corporate-sponsored patent search system.
U.S. Code: a searchable resource from Cornell Law School
U.S. Trademark Electronic Search System
Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts is a good resource for questions--and sometimes even representation--on legal issues in the arts.
Please send comments, suggestions, or corrections to links at sfwa.org