Lindsay and Patrick Heineke seem to be doing everything right, financially speaking. The Whitinsville, Mass. couple are aggressively paying down mortgage debt and are saving for retirement at a pace that would put most of their twentysomething peers to shame.

There's just one thing Lindsay, 26, and Patrick, 27, are missing. And in today's turbulent economic climate, it might be the most vital investment of all: a sufficient emergency fund.

This cash account is a kind of insurance policy against financial calamity. When you're suddenly faced with a bill you couldn't possibly have budgeted for, the money is there. In a worst-case scenario, like a computer replacing your job, the fund can cover your family's living expenses while you look for work.

The last time Wayne Lipovitch tried to get his family's finances on track, he flipped open the phone book and randomly picked out an adviser near his Phoenix home. That planner guided the Lipovitches' modest investments for a couple of years, and she became a family friend.

But Wayne, 41, admits he never understood how - or how much - she got paid. So after his dad convinced him he could save money by investing on his own, he figured, why not? He felt guilty leaving the adviser, "but my main responsibility is to make sure our family is secure," he says.

So far it hasn't been easy. Wayne stresses about how to pay for retirement or provide for his wife Michele, 38, and their two sons. Adding to the pressure: Their older child, Jacob, 2, has Down syndrome, a genetic condition that causes developmental delays and impairments.

Jana Purdy, 61, jokes that she robbed the cradle when she nabbed her husband Tim Kramer, 48. The pair met in a volleyball league, and they got married just before a tournament in 1988.

For the past 20 years, their age difference was more of an amusement than a challenge. But with Jana hoping to retire soon - in less than five years - the couple are starting to worry if it might complicate their plans. After all, when she turns 66, Tim will be only 53.

Yet Tim still hopes to quit at the same time as Jana. "We've tried to look at retirement calculators and programs that would let us know what we can do, but they try to squeeze every kind of couple into a shoebox," he says. "We don't fit into that shoebox."

There's a movement afoot to make you directly pay more of the bill for your health care. The theory is that this will make you more choosy and that you'll put more effort into comparing costs and researching doctors and hospitals.

But for that to happen, of course, you'll need good information to work with. It takes five minutes of Web surfing to compare prices and features and to check out customer reviews on, say, a digital camera.

But for health care? "We just haven't evolved to that level," says Jean Chenoweth, a senior vice president at Thomson Healthcare, a division of the giant information services company.

"Sigrid Crane couldn't understand it. The tax assessor for the town of Vienna, Va. pegged the value of her home in 2007 at $570,000, up $20,000 from the year before, despite the fact that the local market had already gone south. Crane fought back - and won.

She may soon have a lot of company. Property taxes have risen at more than twice the rate of inflation this decade. When home prices were going up at least that much, it was hard to complain. Besides, since many locales re-assess properties to their "true market value" only every few years (in some cases even less frequently), an owner in a particularly hot neighborhood made out. The value of his property rose faster than one across town, but the tax burden didn't shift."

"When Elisabeth and Tom Merrill decided to sell their home in Wenatchee, Wash. (pop. 107,000) they braced themselves for a long slog.

The couple and their four kids were bursting out of their 2,400-square-foot house, but they had read about the nation's slow-as-sludge real estate market and expected the worst.

But their house sold in 10 hours for $387,000, 80% more than they paid six years ago. 'I was thrilled," says Elisabeth. 'I can't believe how fast it happened.'"

"Most buyers these days do research online before buying, but it's easy to drive yourself to distraction and confusion going through dozens of sites, free and paid, that offer car reviews and purported pricing expertise.

Here's the most efficient way to find the car you want at the right price. It'll cost you $13 but save you hundreds, if not thousands.

For $5.95, buy a month's worth of access to ConsumerReports.org, where the "advanced search" tool will let you break down your choices by car type, number of passengers, price and miles per gallon."

"Who's Scott Burkett? A small-time actor; a family lawyer; a techie at the University of North Carolina.

But if you Google "Scott Burkett," eight of the top 10 results, and most of the next 20, point to the 38-year-old chief executive of PlayMotion, a small video-game company.

That's no coincidence. Over the past decade, video-game Scott has carefully nurtured his digital dossier. Why bother?"

"Nestled in the affluent, gated community of Jacob's Way on the Northside is a secret. Its young landscaping betrays how new the neighborhood is, and a builder is trying to sell its last few available homes for nearly $300,000.

Although the community, which is off Dunn Avenue, isn't even finished, five of its families have had near brushes with foreclosure or are now in the process.

The home of the Nash family - which includes James, Doreszell, and five children - doesn't fit the profile of the low-end foreclosed homes seen in the news."

"Tom Scholl answered the opposing attorney's questions tersely, his voice barely audible even in a silent courtroom.

'And Keystone Properties' only asset is its interest in the Smurfit property, correct?' asked Joel Settembrini, referring to 60 riverfront acres on Talleyrand Avenue by the name of its former owner, Jefferson Smurfit.

Scholl bristled.

'It's my property.'"

"PANAMA CITY BEACH -- Lee Sullivan knows change is inevitable.

The mayor of Panama City Beach speaks in a low baritone, steeped in an accent from his native Montana. He wears worn boots and a cowboy hat to the office and reminisces about a time when he could ride horses on the beach and was threatened more by hogs getting into trash cans than by speeding tourists.

That Panama City Beach is dead and gone. In its place is a seemingly endless stretch of hulking condominium towers with tens of thousands of units, a strong retail corridor with big-box stores and a county population that has already grown nearly 10 percent in the past five years, according to the U.S. Census Bureau."

"It didn't take long for Sage Stevens to feel the pressure. An appraiser who has worked for the Jacksonville Appraisal Group for six months, Stevens says she got a phone call on Tuesday that has become customary during her short tenure. A mortgage broker asked if her firm could guarantee a home's value before even inspecting the house.

'When I said 'no,' he sounded surprised and asked if we get a lot of complaints about that,' she said. 'He asked if we're able to get any business (because we won't do it).'"

"Tammy Martin, a 37-year-old instructor at the University of Hawaii, couldn't believe it.

'This is wild,' she said. 'You can't live your life in a balloon, you know? But this is just wild.' Her shock was warranted. I had just called her on an unlisted cellphone number and informed her that I had her Social Security number, Visa card number, bank account and personal identification numbers, and eBay account name and password."

"Shelbi Ramey has about $13,000 in credit card debt and a poor credit report score of 511, She's also in second grade.

The 7-year-old Zephyrhills, Fla., resident is a victim of identity theft, robbed of good credit and accosted by debt collectors before she could go to a PG-13 movie by herself, let alone get a driver's license."

"Alfie Dennen was petrified. The 29-year-old London resident had just received an image on his cellphone from Adam Stacey, a friend standing in a smoky tunnel in the London Underground. Since cellphone networks were either overloaded or shut down across the city, Dennen could not get in touch with his friend, and the only indication that Stacey was fine was that he needed to have gotten above ground to send the photo.

Five minutes later, Dennen posted the dark and blurry cellphone image, which shows Stacey holding a cloth over his face in front of a subway train, on his picture weblog hosted by moblog.co.uk. Within a few hours , the image was broadcast and rebroadcast by major television networks across Britain, providing a riveting on-site image of the chaos that had enveloped the London Underground."

"Hackers uploaded a virus to siphon off credit card information from CardSystems Solutions Inc. Thieves posed as legitimate businesses to purchase personal information from ChoicePoint Inc. But a search of state records posted online and easily accessible by the public reveals that thieves would not have to go through nearly that much trouble to steal the identities of many Massachusetts residents."