Easy Change

This past week was filled with excitement, albeit the uncomfortable variety when I had to pay my bills quickly via my bank's electronic payment system and made a mistake which will be annoying at least, and costly at worst. First, the week was a busy one in which I did not feel like I had the time I needed in order to do it properly. Lesson Learned: carve out time in your normal routine to pay bills and check on finances. Not doing so will cause mistakes. The mistake was a rather easy one to make: I paid one bill on my electronic banking instead of another bill. They were named something similar so the mistake was fairly easy to make. The result was a large credit on one account and an outstanding balance on another. Second, I discovered the mistake but was so blindsided by it that I didn't handle it properly, immediately and instead intended to simply run up this month's expenses against the card with the credit. And thereby paying everything off within the next 30 days or...

Thinking about the recent holiday this weekend has given me a bit of perspective regarding gift giving. Something that I had forgotten until I was recently reminded is how very much people really fill up their emptiness with the shopping and busyiness of the holiday season. I had a conversation with family members recently to reiterate the importance of a reasonable (read small) amount of gifts. For some reason, no matter how much I stress this, there is always resistance. I find the whole ritual can be somewhat frustrating. Gift giving becomes a stressful game of chicken with often little more than wasted money and hurt feelings. Now that I have outlined the problem, what are the solutions? 1. For me, early and often discussions about the issue seem to help. Sometimes the gifts can be a way for people to try to make up for lost time and connections during the year. So to alleviate that, make more time for loved ones. 2. Avoid going nuclear. When doing the gift giving, stay consistent....

This week has been relatively relaxed for me and I will admit that I have really enjoyed it. By my nature, I am a doer. I like to feel like I accomplished something; this goes along with my work ethic I suppose. But one thing that sticks with me about vacations is something that my grandfather told me and it still rings true: Vacations can be expensive. What he means is simply that the more leisure time you have, the more things you'll want to do with that time that take money. This can be things that are hobbies, travel, or even home repair. All of these things take money -- money that you'd otherwise save if you had been working instead. So in that respect, unless you alone in a public park, homeless, and not eating food on your leisure time, leisure time is expensive. Well, this week I noticed that this still remains the case, but I feel like I did relatively well. For a full week off, I spent only about a hundred dollars for travel, food etc. Given that I normally spend abo...

Given the time of year, things are drawing to a close and one of the things to think about is what has worked and what hasn't as far as your personal finance plan goes. For me, one of the things that I tried about 3 years ago was using propser loans. My record isn't that bad, and in some ways, Prosper did exactly what I wanted it to--it secured a series of funds to achieve a higher interest rate than I could get otherwise if the money remained entirely liquid. You can see my track record with prosper. For many people, like Pensonier , it doesn't work out so well. Personally, for legal reasons, it is not possible to invest with them anymore. As for me, I am withdrawing the money now and slowly building up my roth IRA for retirement by dollar-cost averaging. What is most telling about the process of lending money is that there is so much involved in making the loans, that it really tricks you into thinking that the investments are somewhat safe. Personally, for the amounts I...

Consuelo Mack: Wealthtrack is fast becoming one of my favorite shows to watch on the weekend. This weekend, Consuelo had on David Einhorn from Greenlight Capital, a firm that made its name by shorting large firms during the fiscal crisis and made a killing doing so. Greenlight Capital is a hedge fund, and its investors have been quite happy with the returns. But while he is known for being short, Greenlight capital is about 1.5 long versus 1.0 long in terms of a mix of investments. As for Quantitative Easing, Einhorn referenced the fact that the Fed is targeting inflation, but notes that there is a problem with it. The problem is that the inflation might come, but not where you expect it to. It may come in clothing, energy, food etc. These would be things that everyone needs, not things that are real luxury-type items that people are looking for to increase demand. On Gold, to Einhorn, Gold is money. "The merit of gold is that given [the current crisis] is how we want our assets d...

Just this past week I was on a visit to some family a few hours away and I was pleased at how efficient the trip was. The cost of the fuel to get there was not overly expensive and good planning kept the costs down to something reasonable. Due to space constraints, I opted to get a hotel room for the night but this was planned for in advance. I use the same chain each time to accumulate reward points. However, about half way through the weekend, I noticed that I was getting a cold and felt like I had a sore throat. Cut to a trip to the pharmacy to get a package of cold medicine. Even the store brand, which was on sale, still cost about nine dollars. The costs of these things really are increasing. That is the very reason why I find comments that there is no inflation to be dubious at best. Statistics from the Dept. of Labor when it comes to the Consumer Price Index (CPI) tell a more accurate story than just waving-of-hands types of comments. The CPI shows, in short that there are many...

To say that this month has been difficult with the spending would be a huge understatement. Just this past weekend I went overboard on the spending with clothes and christmas shopping. What's more, the car needed new brakes this weekend--420 dollars! Yikes! Yes, Christmas shopping. I know that it is early, but I still intend to be prepared and get it out of the way. That said, there are huge cutbacks this year. I'm hoping this update with help me get some perspective. First off, in our own families, we are keeping the gifts much smaller. Even though I normally give bonds to my nephews and neices I have decided to not do that this year. The bonds are normally quite small and we need to make sure we're being more careful with our money in this economy. No one knows what the future holds. While the stock market has bounced back, it certainly seems like we cannot feel certain about anything. Volitility seems to be quite high over the past few years, so who knows what will happe...