Easy Change

This weekend I was looking forward to a great time. I had lots of stuff going on and the weekend just sort of got away from me. On Friday night I got absolutely slammed with work and it turned out that I really didn't get out from underneath it until Saturday night. To add insult to injury, I was experiencing a bit of discomfort from a muscle strain in my back that was presumably from working out on Friday night. Truthfully, I am fairly timid when I exercise and I am surprised that I hurt myself, but then again, it was bound to happen sooner or later, right? So I've taken a break from exercising for a few days but now I am out of my routine. And just like anything else for me, once I get into a routine, the inertia of it all makes it simple for me to continue. But then again, once I find myself outside of it, it is hard to recover. But I've recovered before and so I am going to get back on the horse again. Similarly, at one of my jobs I made a financial mistake which cost m

Many of us dream of being millionaires. And although we are in an age in the United States where a million isn't "what it used to be", we still find ourselves dreaming of the possibilities that our lives would hold if we somehow came into that kind of money. And is the opportunity going to be made even easier by new legislation to allow online gambling? Now when I said "The Hard Way" here in the title, I don't mean working, at least not in the typical sense of being a CEO or marketing exec who grinds out 12-14 hour days, or being a salesperson who is a perpetual road warrior. Instead, I am talking about taking big risks. Since it is Friday, I figured that I would take a moment to highlight one of poker's newly recognized players: Joe Pelton. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Pelton He is an avid amateur player who has made just shy of 2 million dollars in the past six months, mostly on two tournaments played in 2006 where he had breakout performances. Am

As I generally keep a pretty good eye on my retirement, I find it interesting now to see all of the stuff that is going on in terms of the markets. People acknowledge that the markets are doing much better than the economy. Last night I watched a news report that showed that the increase from 12k to 13k for the dow has only taken the last 7 months whereas the previous increase of 1k took 7 years. Now granted, I will give you the fact that compounding helps, but the power of compounding (in the short-run) for 11k is not all that different than 12k. So that is not the whole answer. Should I be discounting? What I am considering is actually padding my retirement spreadsheet by adjusting my retirement account figures down by 5% in order to "buffer" for the coming storm. Frankly, I am glad that the market is seeing all time highs, but I think in that sometime in the next 30 years there is going to be some kind of correction for this kind of growth. It's just a little too much

Recently, I tried selling a few printer ink cartridges online and I was really dissapointed. I tried both amazon.com and ebay (which charged me a listing fee) and neither one has worked. I'm not really sure how to feel about the whole experience, but I know that there are many pf bloggers out there who have much success with buying and selling stuff on ebay and/or other websites. How do you do it? Is it worth the time? Where do you acquire the stuff to sell? Personally, I think it is likely that this will be my first and last experience doing this. It took me about 15 minutes to setup the auction on ebay and I found that there were way too many options and it was confusing as a first-time user. Finally, I got the item listed only to realize that I was going to be charged a listing fee -- all for an item that might not ever even sell. Since I have so many other things that I could be doing with my time, doing auctions that only make me 5 or 10 bucks a pop just doesn't seem to m

This week I received an invitation to go to a family member's 50th birthday celebration. It really just cements the idea that I have that we are absolutely responsible for our retirement. Now although this seems painfully obvious, it seems to me that if you are really interested in protecting your retirement and your savings you need to start getting agressive -- with your family! The issue here is so common, but I don't see many people talking about it in the PF Blogging community. Just imagine the scenario: You are a twenty-something or a thirty-something. You delay gratification so you can save. You pick good investments, mutual funds, and have a nice healthy e-fund setup so that you generally pay cash for your large purchases. And good thing too. You've saved yourself about 100k in compounded interest over the course of your life by avoiding car loans and credit cards like the plague. Ok sure, not everyone is in this situation, but many people do a good job managing the

As many people in PF blog land have already discovered, having a freedom fund ( a separate savings account for 'expected' expenses ) earmarked for big future purchases can really be a life saver. Since it has been about 18 months since my last vacation, I have finally decided to take the plunge, as it were and book a trip. Of course, there is not really an easy way to pay for a trip like this using cash when booking over the internet. But, since I had money stashed in the Freedom Fund, I was easily able to book the trip. I have now transferred money from my freedom fund over at ING Direct and paid the credit card bill for the trip all well in advance of the arrival of said statement. In the end I will likely pay a few dollars of interest, but that sure beats the regular amount that I would pay if I kept a running balance for the trip over many months like I used to do. The positive steps that I have taken with my debt have given the monthly budget a lot more wiggle room this ye

Not long ago I was riding the commuter train home from work. And while I was on the train I remember someone discussing their retirement account that had about 70k in it. This seemed amazing, if not impossible since I knew that I was only able to contribute a mere fraction of that. I felt discouraged as I went home. All of this despite the fact that this was a guy that was at least 10 years older than I was. But here I was thinking that I should have much much more in my account and that there was no way for someone like me to achieve this. If you're looking for a great ending, stop now. There isn't one. I don't have that kind of money....yet. But I have learned to let go of this fear, this resentment toward people with nice and fat net worths. It seems all too easy for people to give up or become resentful against the rich since they think, hey, I can't even do that if I wanted to. Laura Rowley takes this attitude on with an amazing column on Yahoo Finance this week. h

One of the most challenging things in life is prioritizing. I find this is true for me particularly during the holidays and during the summer. There are so many things to do and see and just not enough time to do them. This is slightly different from time management in that time management is really the art of taking the time that you have allocated for a particular task or set of tasks and using techniques to ensure that this time is used for the tasks that you have decided on accomplishing. For me, the problem isn't so much with time management. I've gotten better at that recently and I know how my body and mind work so I can handle that much of the time. Instead, the problem is more upstream -- prioritizing. I enjoy doing many different things throughout the day. I don't have ADD or ADHD or anything like that, but I really like switching gears often. I notice a significant reduction in my productivity if I have to do the same thing for more than 2-3 hours straight. I ins

Ok ok. Its not entirely true. Lately I've been playing quite a bit of poker online. Although I've played cards for over 20 years (poker for many of them), I've just recently fallen back into poker. Just with fake money, but I've been doing rather well. I like poker quite a bit because of the social aspects as well as the mathematical aspects of it. Since I am naturally drawn to numbers, statistics, logic, etc, it is not a big shock that I find poker...Texas Hold'em in particular to be so much fun. But when it comes to keeping your mind sharp, especially when it comes to investing I find that Texas Hold'em does a great job: -- Texas Hold'em Poker forces you to think quickly about your chances of winning the hand. Being quick-witted is a skill that is useful almost everywhere in life. -- Texas Hold'em Poker forces you often to be patient and wait for the right opportunity. Players that don't do this are considered loose or live and will lose most (if

I had a moment around lunchtime today so I figured I'd check out Casey Serin's blog. Casey Serin. You know, that guy who bought like 7 properties using shady (if not completely fake) information to get the loans and is now stuck between a rock and proverbial hard place when it comes to moving forward financially.?. Anyway, he writes on his blog that he is going to be getting some help from Suze Orman. I watch Suze's show though and I didn't see him on there so I must have missed the episode he was on. But in regard to the meetup of these two personalities, one commenter on Casey's blog seemed quite concise. A commenter named Segfault writes -- "Her financial advice is not always top-tier, but I'd rate her far above Robert Kiyosaki. I'd rate her below John Bogle, Ben Stein, and William Bernstein. That said, and not even having heard her specific advice to you, I think you should take her advice, because it will probably be the best you've gotten so

So, I went to the mail this weekend and was pleasantly surprised to open up one of the statements and find that a retirement account had twice as much as I thought it had. I don't know if I messed up the spreadsheet I track with or something, but I was quite pleased when I plugged in the updated numbers. This month's net worth entry is going have a nice bump and I am excited. And is it me, or is the market doing quite nicely? I just checked and on the year I am averaging about 5% in my retirement accounts. That is not too shabby; granted, you can make that in a savings account, but if it continues to grow at that rate I should easily get to over 10% on the year which is my target.

An article on MSN Money offers a few of the following "average" benefits from companies according to a recent survey. I thought it was pretty interesting to learn how my company benefits were compared to the average. How does your benefit package stack up? Fringe benefits can be costly for companies but significantly improve loyaly among employees. Immediate eligibility for a health-care plan. A 401(k) plan in which the typical match is 50 cents for each $1 an employee contributes, up to a certain percentage of pay. Access to a dental plan with 100% of exams covered and 80% coverage for dental work. Access to a vision plan separate from medical or dental coverage. A group life insurance plan that pays a year of salary or wages as a death benefit. Long-term-disability benefits with pay replacement of 60%. On average, 11.7 days of vacation after one year of service and 15.4 after five years of service. Eight to 12 paid holidays a year. Dependent-care spending accounts and ac

Well its that time again. I've updated my spreadsheet and things are progressing along quite nicely. Currently, net worth is up about 1% over last month. This is largely due to savings deposits and such and was not really helped much by the fact that the market has been rather so-so of late. Most of this increase has been in the retirement accounts due to regular contributions. But since I don't think I've really broken this down here before, and I think it is interesting data... http://www.networthiq.com/people/EasyChange/2007/03 Percentage of Total Net Worth Home Equity: ~40% Retirement : ~40% Auto: ~10% Stuff/Cash: ~10% Of course, this is going to change over time, I hope. It certainly doesn't feel very diversified to have nearly 1/2 of the total net worth to be tied up in a property, but then again, its home. So in that sense, it is totally worth it.

So I will admit it. I am a little scared. Since the open enrollment for changing and updating our 401k contributions just happened at work, I decided to go up another point. I made the change online yesterday but it is a little scary. I did some quick math and I can afford it but I will definitely be tight when it comes to pocket money. However, there is an upside!. If I am able to keep myself at this percentage, I did some calculating that with normal pay increases and compounding it could increase my nest egg by a couple of hundred thousand bucks in retirement. Thats no small change. So I am hopeful. Of course, there are tons of variables in the equation, but I never really thought that I would be able to increase my deduction three percentage points in less than a 18 months. It has been the result of careful money management and being very diligent. Now lets just see if I can make it work :)

Google has introduced a brand new feature. They are allowing all of their users to actually print out all of their emails AND photos and have them shipped via regular post to you for no charge. Of course, the downside is that they need to make the money for this service to operate so they have decided to sell advertising on the "backside" of the documents and photos that are printed. But considering how cool this feature is, I am really excited to get my first photos. Using gmail paper is very easy. Once you go to check your gmail, you will see advertising for it. Then you can learn more about it. But once you have signed in to your email, you must enable options under settings in order to get it to work. Obviously, the main thing that they need is your physical address so that they can send you the stuff. All in all, seems like a great service. (btw, this is all a joke; it is google's April Fools Day Joke. If you want to read more, check this link: ) http://mail.google.c