You may wonder how somebody could lose track of an investment like this. The thing is, savings bonds take 20 to 40 years to mature, so people sometimes just forget about them.

But it’s worth checking, because the average successful search turns up bonds worth about $1,000.

If you’re one of the 55 million people who own U.S. savings bonds, there could be big bucks heading your way!

‘Good Morning America’ Shows You The Money! Watch Video:

Jerry Williams of Pennsylvania remembers seeing patriotic promotional ads as a girl. So when she became a young working woman, she started buying savings bonds.

It was like an old-fashioned 401k.

“It’s just been a blessing in our lives,” Williams said.

When Williams saw a “Good Morning America” link about unclaimed savings bonds, she didn’t think she’d find any because she had always kept hers in a safe and thought she’d cashed them all in.

“I thought, ‘oh well, I’ll just do it anyway.’ Bang — there it was. And it was a thrill,” she told “GMA.”

“Count me in” is what Lorraine Silva and 70 others said when the Treasury Department was looking for volunteers to help reunite citizens with their savings bonds.

“It’s very rewarding to feel that you’ve done something to make somebody happy and to perhaps change their life in some way,” Silva said.

The government’s savings bond push was such a success that it takes a million microfilm reels in a room the length of a football field to hold all of the records.

Sure enough, some of those records were Williams’.

When Silva called with the good news, Williams was stunned. She had invested $50 and figured she’d get a hundred back, but got $521 instead — 10 times her original investment.

“I thought, I’m just going to plant flowers,” she said. “$500 worth. $500 worth of flowers. I’m just planting them.”

That would make a beautiful ending to the story, but there’s more. I suggested Williams search for savings bonds in her husband’s name. She found some.

And then, while “GMA” was at Williams’ house, she found still more unredeemed savings bonds for her daughter, Becky Maholic.

Maholic now continues the tradition, buying savings bonds for her son.

“It’ll be exciting to see if my son ever has the same excitement. Lost money that’s found,” Maholic said.

In the end, the Williams family received checks for a total of $924.

In some cases, bonds are so old that workers have to search microfilm archives for documentation. The government’s savings bond push was such a success that it takes a million microfilm reels in a room the length of a football field to hold all of the records.

What makes a good home based business opportunity? Most important is whether it is the right opportunity for you. There are many different reasons why people want to work from home. Some may be tired of the daily commute. Some may be living in a remote part of the world where jobs are few and business opportunities even fewer. Some may be more interested in work at home opportunities to allow them to earn extra money while they have to take care of children or elderly relatives. Others may be looking for a way to start their own business and home seems the ideal base from which to start off their enterprise.

You can make a full-time living with your home business if you setup correctly, get started right, and choose a business at which you are likely to succeed. To do that you should look and all the business opportunities that are available to you. There are very many home business opportunities and you want to be sure that you’re making the right choice.

If you are now looking for a business, doing market research, or just wondering if you can find a home business that would be good for you, we recommend these:

1. Internet home based business. An Internet home business will give you the flexibility to work where you want to, when you want to, so you can control your working hours and mix it in with your daily home routine. There are many business opportunities online that promise to bring you riches beyond your wildest dreams.The lifeblood of any Internet business is traffic. Without it you have no business. There are many ways to drive traffic to your site and you should investigate all or most of them and pick a method that suits you. Then focus on that method until you get good at it. When you identify your home based business opportunity it is good to use pay per click ads which is the fastest way to get traffic if it’s in your budget. You should also be using search engine optimization tactics to help the search engines find your site and bring you free traffic.
2. Affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing has the potential to make you rich, and the best part, your allowed to be creative all day long. If you are looking for a great home business opportunity but don’t know where to start, consider affiliate marketing. Many people decide they want to work at home on the Internet or even start their own online business but don’t know what steps to take. You may have considered joining a company such as the Pampered Chef or Avon or Mary Kay and selling items for a living, but realized the party hosting, door to door lifestyle just isn’t your thing. If you want a home business that can be done without any public interaction, definitely consider affiliate marketing. With affiliate marketing, you promote someone else’s product and when you make a sale, you get part of the profits.
3. Network or multilevel marketing (MLM). Network marketing by definition requires building up a down line of other sellers who earn you money from the additional members you recruited and from the products they sold. Having a down line is really great because it allows you to earn passive income, money that you don’t have to work for to receive. Some of these programs requires fees to join them. The fees can often times be very excessive and the company will usually try to up sell you into buying additional products like training materials and samples. These materials are design to help you promote their products or services.
4. Sell Products online. One most common way of earning money is by selling products in the internet. In order to succeed, you must pick one product that customers are willing to buy. In addition, you should have a site and you must have techniques on how to attract visitors to your site.
5. Create web content. Another method of Internet home based business is article marketing. Creating compelling web content (articles) is essential for success online. All Internet surfers, shoppers, workers and researchers turn to the Internet as a source f information and news in the first instance. Their secondary action is to buy/ sell/ recommend or sign up. You need to ensure that you are providing great content first and then directing your reader to an action.There are a great many ways to put content on the web. Ensure the information that you are putting out there is informative, original, correct and useful and you will find the increase in the traffic to your website. Web content is information about a particular subject that is written in a concise, knowledgeable and professional way. It can be presented in the form of a webpage, blog, article or forum post. All of these mediums all for other Internet users to search for and find your content – particularly if it is based around a specific keyword. If you write your content well, include a link back to your original blog/website and SEO your content well, you will have an excellent library of content on the web that continually links back to your website/blog. With article marketing you write articles that have links back to your site and submit them to article directories. This will build links pointing to your site and over time will drive traffic directly from the articles.
6. Click On Some Freebies. The freebies that may suddenly appear through your screen may cause annoyance, however, you can actually earn some money from them. So, click some freebies that you may encounter while surfing because who knows you might just earn the amount you need without ever costing you a penny.

When you are pursuing a home business opportunity you do not have to spend a lot of money to start your business. There are very many things at you can do to make money with your home business without having to spend a lot of money on an Internet store, in a web site, or expensive inventory.

Start working on your own personal wealth and stop working on the clock. Earn what you’re worth and make that change TODAY!

Dollar risks losing status as a world reserve currency, warns in a new report by HSBC. Situation of the dollar is painfully reminiscent of the pound after the First World War, said the head of foreign exchange manager of the bank, David Bloom, which refers to the Daily Telegraph. “The whole picture of risk-reward for emerging market currencies has changed. It is not so much that they have risen to our standards, it is that we have fallen to theirs. It used to be that sovereign risk was mainly an emerging market issue but the events of the last year have shown that this is no longer the case. Look at the UK – debt is racing up to 100% of GDP, ” said Bloom.
Meanwhile, China and other emerging economies in Asia, had reached the point where they can no longer be artificially low rates for their currencies to maintain export because it creates chaos in their own economy, maintaining inflation of the bubbles, the newspaper said. “Mercantilist” mentality that prevailed in Asia in the past few decades looses its position because of inflationary expectations.
This problem was already evident at the last stage of the credit boom, but the financial crisis at the time smoothed the effect. But this pressure will increase as developing countries will maintain solid growth, leaving the U.S. behind.
Thus, the newspaper says, we are witnessing an epochal decline in economic power and wealth of the old G10 bloc of rich countries against the backdrop of growth in the new world.
According to Bloom, the regional currencies will become a kind of anchor for smaller trading partners in developing countries, and the role of the U.S. would assume China, Brazil or South Africa.

President Obama, looking to boost lending to small business, will start using some of the leftover federal bailout funds to shore up smaller community banks and induce them to offer credit to firms he called the “backbone of the American economy.”

Smaller financial institutions are in greater need of capital to grow and expand, whereas the country’s large banks have moved past their need for what’s left of the $700-billion Troubled Asset Relief Program, Obama said Thursday at a family-owned storage business in suburban Washington.

“The major banks that were in critical condition a year ago need no new assistance from the government,” Obama said, “and so we are winding down that portion of the TARP program.”

Less than $140 billion is left from the bailout that Congress approved a year ago. The Treasury will decide how much of that should go to smaller financial institutions by the end of the year after conferring with community bankers nationwide.

To spur lending to small businesses, Obama said, it is “essential that we make more credit available to the smaller banks and community financial institutions that these businesses depend on. These are the community banks who know their borrowers, who gave them their first loan, who have watched them grow from down the street, not from Wall Street.”

The amount of money still on hand is enough to boost lending significantly to small business, one senior administration official said. That may help to allay Democratic lawmakers’ concerns that the bailout money appeared to be skewed too much to big banks.

Some critics questioned whether the president was pursuing the most effective strategy to help small business. Officials of the National Federation of Independent Business said they appreciated the gesture but argued that lower taxes and less government regulation would be more helpful.

Conservative economists pointed out that the bailout was supposed to save banks so big the economy couldn’t thrive without them. Already, bailout funds have been used to prop up struggling homeowners and the auto industry.

“Again, they’re taking emergency money and using it as a slush fund,” said David C. John, senior fellow at the Thomas A. Roe Institute for Economic Policy Studies.

In addition to the shift in bailout spending, Obama also is asking Congress to increase the maximum size of Small Business Administration loans, including those designed to encourage small businesses to invest in machinery, equipment, land and buildings and to expand payrolls.

Increasing the maximum loan size of so-called micro loans from $35,000 to $50,000 would help start-up companies in particular, administration officials said.

“America’s 29 million small businesses have been hard hit in this recession,” said SBA Administrator Karen Mills. “Increasing maximum loan sizes will allow the SBA to ensure that more small business owners and entrepreneurs can get access to the credit they need to expand their operations and create jobs.”

As the stage for his announcement, Obama chose Metropolitan Archives, a small records storage business in Landover, Md., that recently expanded with an SBA loan.

Last February, almost five years after the business opened, co-owners Joe Incarnato and Doug Peters used the money to buy their storage warehouse. Incarnato said the partners would like to expand again, but they need another loan to make it happen.

That’s the kind of enterprise the federal government should be trying to help, some lawmakers said Wednesday.

“These actions will help satisfy the capital needs of small businesses looking to start or expand their operations,” said Sen. Olympia J. Snowe (R-Maine), whose proposals to raise the caps on SBA loans are part of the president’s plan.

“They were good ideas when I introduced them nearly a year ago,” she said. “They were good ideas when I reintroduced them in August, and I am pleased that others, including the president, are on board with these critical initiatives.”

Depending on whom you believe, a dollar hovering near its 52-week low represents either the market’s devastating verdict on the Obama administration’s profligacy or a salutary rediscovery of risk by newly emboldened investors.

Maybe it’s a bit of both. But the downbeat drumbeat bangs on. Chinese officials openly worry about taking a bath on their enormous U.S. Treasury holdings. Foreign bankers talk of promoting an alternative global currency, such as the euro, yuan or a new synthetic medium of exchange cooked up by the International Monetary Fund.

In the U.S., some voices on the right, such as Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., detect an anti-American conspiracy to scuttle the dollar. But the roster of those opining on the dollar’s woes includes establishmentarians such as Robert Zoellick, president of the World Bank and a former top official in Republican administrations. “Looking forward, there will increasingly be other options to the dollar,” he warned last month.

As the U.S. tries to repair its crisis-battered economy, is the end of dollar supremacy about to make a tough job even tougher?

Not any time soon. There are “lots of reasons to be concerned about the dollar. … (But) a weaker dollar is a fantastic boost for the United States, and it’s a problem for the rest of the world,” says Kenneth Rogoff, former IMF chief economist.

A natural monopoly

Since supplanting the British pound more than 60 years ago, the dollar has reigned supreme in global markets. As of the end of June, the most recent data available, 62.8% of foreign exchange reserves worldwide were held in the form of U.S. dollars. An additional 27.5% were stockpiled in euros, according to the IMF.

The dollar’s position has eroded in the past five years. In mid-2004, it made up 67.9% of world reserves. “A lot of people get excited about this. But in the 1970s and 1980s, there was even bigger volatility in the dollar share of reserves,” says Stephen Jen, managing director of BlueGold Capital Management, a London-based hedge fund.

In March, Chinese Central Bank chief Zhou Xiaochuan proposed shifting global finance to a reliance on a new international reserve currency rather than the dollar or any other national unit. The aim would be to avoid the periodic crises that have characterized recent decades. But Zhou acknowledged that any such change would take “a long time.”

The instability of a world economy so dependent on any single national currency is prompting even some leading American figures to argue for a gradual move away from the dollar. Fred Bergsten, former assistant Treasury secretary in the Carter administration, says a major cause of the current crisis was the destabilizing linkage between the U.S. trade deficit, enormous capital flows from abroad that financed it and the global dominance of the U.S. dollar. He argues in a new Foreign Affairs article that, to avoid a repeat episode, the U.S. should promote a move to a “multi-currency system” involving the euro and the yuan.

For now, the dollar’s fundamental standing remains what it’s been for decades: a convenient medium of exchange for buyers and sellers around the world. Just as Chinese merchants speak the global language of English when trading with Saudi oil barons, they use the global currency to buy the oil. “The reserve currency is a natural monopoly. It’s so convenient to list prices in a single currency,” says Harvard University’s Rogoff, co-author of This Time Is Different, a study of financial crises.

The U.S. benefits from the dollar’s unique role, enjoying what French President Valery Giscard d’Estaing memorably labeled the “exorbitant privilege” of being able to borrow abroad in its own currency. That insulates Americans from the danger of seeing their debts skyrocket in response to a sharp decline in the dollar’s value.

The dollar doesn’t owe its global role to international affection for Americans. Investors relying on the cold logic of the marketplace are drawn to the greenback by specific advantages that make the rise of a dollar rival inherently difficult. “There’s no equally attractive alternative,” says economist Barry Eichengreen of the University of California-Berkeley.

In the short run, the only currency that could challenge the dollar is the euro. It, too, has a continental-size economy behind it, and a decade after its introduction, the European currency has established itself as a fully convertible, stable store of value.

But for all its attractions, the euro lacks some essential attributes. Although the European Union has a central bank, comparable to the Federal Reserve, there is no European treasury. Instead, there are 27 European treasuries. Investors can’t easily track or influence fiscal policy on the continent.

The dollar is also buoyed by the existence of a massive government bond market. There’s roughly $4 trillion worth of U.S. Treasuries floating around, and almost $100 billion changes hands each day, according to investment management firm Pimco. Trading that’s carried on almost 24 hours a day, rolling east to west from Tokyo to London to New York, makes it easy to move into and out of dollar positions in a hurry.

Europe, by contrast, has no analogue to the U.S. Treasury market. Instead there is a fragmented scene with individual sovereign debt from Germany, Italy, France and other EU members. No individual market enjoys anything like Treasuries’ liquidity and size.

There’s another potential dollar rival on the horizon, though its day likely lies a decade or more in the future. Just as the United States overtook the British empire, China’s economy one day is likely to pass the U.S.’s. When it does, the yuan would be in position to fill the dollar’s global role.

But before it does, China will have to thoroughly overhaul its existing financial system. Today, the yuan isn’t freely convertible into other currencies, and there are strict limits on the cross-border movement of the Chinese currency. Chinese officials publicly have committed themselves to freeing the yuan to float alongside the dollar, euro, yen and other major currencies. That change, however, won’t happen overnight.

Even if foreign investors have concerns about having so much of their national wealth tied up in dollars, there is a limit to what they can do about it in the short run. The Chinese, for example, have little choice but to keep recycling into Treasury purchases their dollar surpluses from trading with the United States. Beijing wants to prevent the yuan from appreciating against the dollar, to protect employment in its export sector. Even as it worries about the long-term prospects for its dollar-denominated investments, it has to keep buying dollars to do so.

“There’s a gap between what’s feasible and what central banks would like to do,” said Steven Englander, chief foreign exchange strategist for Barclays Capital in New York.

Further to fall

The dollar’s long-run prognosis is negative. In the wake of the crisis, a retrenchment in cross-border financial flows will mean less demand for dollar-denominated assets. And with Uncle Sam’s printing press running overtime to cover the government’s trillion-dollar budget deficits, the currency is expected to be further cheapened, says Eichengreen.

The decline in the dollar’s value in the past seven months largely reflects an unwinding of the “flight to quality” that occurred during the most panicked crisis phase. Amid unprecedented levels of uncertainty late last year, investors flocked to assets denominated in the largest, most liquid currency. That drove the dollar’s value against the euro, for example, up about 13% over the three months ended in March.

Since then, the euro has regained the lost ground and then some. A euro, which settled at $1.50 Wednesday, was at $1.43 in December.

In the political realm, the dollar’s weakness is interpreted as a referendum on American decline. But its steady slippage this year is in line with economic fundamentals — that is, near-zero U.S. interest rates.

That said, neither the euro nor Japanese yen have had anything to celebrate. The biggest beneficiaries of the move out of dollars since March have been currencies of countries that heavily export raw materials, such as the Australian dollar (up 33% against the greenback) and the Canadian loonie (up 21%).

U.S. officials historically repeat mantra-like that they favor a “strong dollar.” That really should be interpreted as a fancy way of saying “no comment.”

So far, the dollar has only retreated back to the level it was at before the Lehman Bros. bankruptcy filing in September 2008 turned an economic downturn into a global financial panic. A weak dollar would be a problem if it contributed to inflation by increasing the cost of imports, or if it got so low so fast that the Fed felt compelled to raise interest rates to attract foreign investors. Neither is the case today.

The shrinking dollar also carries important economic benefits for the U.S. economy as it tries to climb out of recession. By making U.S. goods less expensive overseas, a weaker dollar provides a welcome boost for exports. The Obama administration has said it wants to rebuild the U.S. economy to rely more on making goods here to sell to people in other countries instead of depending on buying more and more stuff made elsewhere.

“The U.S., in the new normal, is going to have to export more because U.S. households will be saving,” said Eichengreen.

For that to happen, the dollar likely has further to fall.