Making money: What the experts say

The right card to take overseas

With the dollar worth only about 0.69 euro—a three-year low—it’s “ever more important for people to be careful about how they spend money abroad,” said Odysseas Papadimitriou in CNBC.com. Credit cards are generally a better deal than traveler’s checks and cash, but not all cards are created equal. The ideal card won’t charge a foreign-transaction fee, which can go as high as 3 percent, and will offer rock-bottom exchange rates. All of Capital One’s cards meet those benchmarks, while only a handful of Chase, Citi, and American Express cards are fee-free. Travelers abroad should never sign a bill expressed in dollars—sometimes offered “to simplify things for American customers”—since the merchant is really out to profit from a jacked-up exchange rate. And bring your passport when shopping with a credit card abroad; many merchants won’t do business without one.

Newspaper stocks worth buying

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The idea of an attractive newspaper stock sounds counterintuitive, said Andrew Bary in SmartMoney.com. After all, newspapers are “one of the market’s most hated industry groups” because of their “steady advertising and circulation losses.” But many newspaper companies also own television and Internet assets that Wall Street is undervaluing. Take Gannett, with 23 TV stations and a majority stake in help-wanted site CareerBuilder; or New York Times Co., which is rapidly developing an online profit center; or Washington Post Co., which owns the “eroding but still profitable” Kaplan test-prep service. All of them “look appealing based on a sum-of-the-parts analysis.”

You’re retired. Now what?

With the exceptions of Michael Jordan, Brett Favre, and most boxers, people usually retire only once, said Paul Keegan in Fortune.com. So it’s important to do it right. That’s why many retirees—especially former executives—are hiring retirement coaches. Bud Robertson, 62, chief financial officer of a software company, hired one after realizing that besides work, “he has never been terribly interested in much else except for his sports cars and a little golf.” His coach, Mike Jeans of New Directions in Boston, encouraged him to reach out to 200 business contacts “to get on a board of directors and stay on people’s radar screens.” Robertson hasn’t figured out his next move, but says having Jeans lead him through the search process “helps a lot for somebody who is used to the structure of a job.”