Nothing can turn a dream vacation into a nightmare quicker than experiencing money problems while you are away from home. While certain circumstances will always be beyond your control, here are some precautions you can take that will make managing your vacation finances a breeze:

1. If you are leaving the country, or even if you are planning to be away from your home for an extended period, it is wise to call your credit card company before you leave and make them aware of your travel plans. If you don’t make your credit card companies aware of your travels, purchases you make in places you don’t frequent might trigger a fraud alert, which could cause suspension of your accounts. This is especially important if you are traveling abroad to countries outside of Western Europe. One simple phone call can save you from a potential hassle and embarrassment.

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New York – Gold rose to a record high of $1618 Monday, buoyed by debt ceiling talks that has frustrated President Obama so much so he cancelled fund-raising trips to meet with Rep. Boehner and Sen. Reid at the White House.

July gold futures hung on to early morning gains Monday, trading at $16123.30, up $12, or 0.75% after setting a new record high of $1618 earlier.

Standard Bank precious metals analyst Leon Westgate said in a note to investors, “The spotlight on the US budgetary crisis is keeping the debt problems of the developing world in firm focus. This is denting confidence and fuelling the desire for safe-haven assets.”

Westgage says support for gold ranges from $1600 to $1580 and resistance is $1624 to $1627.

The stalemate in Washington between Republicans and Democrats over the U.S.

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Washington – As President Obama and congressional leaders meet Saturday at the White House, trying to restart collapsed negotiations to avoid a government default, polls show the public sharply divided on the debt problem’s urgency, in a sour mood, and favoring more compromise between the parties.

Negotiations between House Speaker John Boehner and President Obama collapsed Friday afternoon. They had been working to hammer out a deal to reduce the nation’s debt and to increase the US debt ceiling to avert an August 2 default when the country is slated to run out of cash.

New polling data highlights the political challenges for both sides in the negotiations who were quick to blame each other for the breakdown in talks. Obama said Speaker Boehner had walked away from a deal that would have averted default and cut spending by $2.6 trillion.

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Choosing a host for your small business website, at first may not seem like a big decision. However, there are crucial things to take into consideration when dealing with Internet Service Providers. Mistakes can be made everywhere in your company but making a mistake when choosing a web host provider can potentially be fatal. In a 2006 Akami survey, 75% of people would not return to websites that took longer than 4 seconds to load. Improve your site’s loading speed and reliability, by choosing  a reputable web host and understanding the top 4 SMB pitfalls:

Is the majority of your business done via eCommerce? If your webhost doesn’t have proper backup, you are at the mercy of their servers. Putting your website on their server, means that if they have internal errors, you have a crisis.

Solution: You can host your main site on one server and have a mirror site on another server.

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Washington – A new spending proposal by the Senate’s bipartisan “Gang of Six” Tuesday is being called a potential breakthrough in efforts to include major deficit reduction in a “grand bargain” to raise the national debt ceiling.

But with Congress running out of time before the Aug. 2 debt-ceiling deadline and partisan forces already criticizing the plan, it faces numerous challenges to break the deadlock on Capitol Hill.

It is, however, seen as having better prospects than the Republicans’ “cut, cap, and balance” bill passed by the House Tuesday night in a near-party line vote, 234 to 190. The bill, which would cap future spending at less than 20 percent of gross domestic product and require passage of a balanced-budget amendment to the Constitution, has virtually no chance of passing the Senate, and the president has vowed to veto it.

The proposal by the bipartisan senators in the Gang of Six, by contrast, tries to strike a middle ground between spending cuts and revenue increases and is based on the recommendations of the president’s deficit commission.

The details of the proposal have yet to be released.

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