Virginia Varela, Golden Pacific Bank president and CEO, offers her insight into the region’s community banks.

California’s major revenue sources have shifted over time. Until 1995, the biggest was property taxes. Today, it’s personal income taxes.

And California ranks fairly high in overall taxation: 10th highest both per capita and as a percentage of personal income, based on the latest available data from the U.S. Census.

The California Public Employees’ Retirement System, the largest U.S. pension fund, is weighing a policy to urge companies in which it invests to disclose sexual-harassment settlements.

If the math proved easy when pricing your home, perhaps you’ve made this critical mistake. 

When you really think about it, what are the two pieces of finance that can impact someone the hardest? The answer, we think, is budgeting and credit.

So why is it that we don’t learn about these topics in school?  

Getting into college is only half the challenge; paying for it is quite another. According to research conducted by two assistant professors of economics, in a paper titled “Accounting for the Rising in College Tuition,” the cost of college tuition more than doubled from 1987 to 2010, and outpaced inflation by 2-4 percent.

As it stands today, roughly 12 million Baby Boomers own some type of small business, the combined value of which is roughly equal to $10 trillion. This comes at a time when the oldest of them have just crossed into their seventies.

PayPal is turning to its old nemesis, plastic, to help it expand beyond the digital realm.

Ten years ago Monday, a pair of Bear Stearns hedge funds that had gorged on subprime mortgage securities filed for bankruptcy, becoming the canaries in the coal mine for the global financial system that collapsed 15 months later.

Alan Brill has scoured computers for intelligence left by Iraqi forces retreating from Kuwait. He has probed a bank in Bosnia suspected of funding ethnically targeted mass murder. He has investigated the work of hackers who got inside the 2008 presidential campaign networks of Barack Obama and John McCain.

What’s on his radar now? Your kids.

How tech-savvy are you? Recent volatility in popular technology stocks, including Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Google parent Alphabet and others, is a reminder to check the tech weighting in your retirement portfolio.

After almost a decade, Americans may finally be turning the corner on saving money. More than 30 percent of them say they have enough tucked away to cover six months’ worth of expenses — a seven-year high for this measure of financial calamity preparedness, a financial planning favorite.

With graduation gifts, it’s the thought that counts. The cash is nice, too. 

More and more Americans are waiting until the very last minute to do their taxes.

Susan DeMarois, the state policy director at the California State Policy Office of the Alzheimer’s Association, offers her perspective on the costs associated with Alzheimer’s and other related dementias. For more from DeMarois, check out “Fortress of Solvency” in our April issue.

Setting a retirement savings goal can feel like a crap shoot. How can you calculate your expenses, especially for health care, five, 10, 50 years from now?

If you’ve punted, you have company. Only 41 percent of workers have even tried to figure out how much they need in savings to retire comfortably. 

Are millions of Americans just forgetting to file their taxes this year?

A key Republican Senator is casting doubt on hopes for quick action to dismantle the Dodd-Frank Act or overhaul the U.S. mortgage-finance system, citing the need for bipartisan support in a Congress that seems to be far from providing it.

It seems 39 percent of millennials would rather disclose a preexisting sexually transmitted disease to a potential partner than reveal their debt, according to a survey of 2,000 millennials SoFi conducted, using online poller Survey Monkey. In addition, the survey found that serious debt was the second-biggest romantic deal-breaker, after workaholism.

California’s contributions to the California State Teachers’ Retirement System are projected to almost triple in less than a decade and may increase even more due to low investment returns and the cost of benefits enhanced in boom times.