LivingAlmostLarge

Today DH’s ESPP bought his company stock at a 15% discount.  It happens every three months.  It’s been a good savings vehicle for us for tuition, home repairs, etc.  We save 10% of our salary and get about a 10% return when we sell the stock immediately.  However, it does take a few days to [...]

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Money Magazine interviewed Suze Orman in an article.  Very neat.  One thing is Suze is switching out of Index funds into Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs), which are basically the same thing except they trade like stocks and have more diversity.  DH and I personally own a bunch of ETFs because you can tailor it better [...]

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The question asked is $1 Million dollars enough to retire?  On Yahoo Finance, the article questions whether it is or not.  The article thinks that $1 million dollars is not enough to retire on today, but in previous generations it was.  The idea is withdrawing 4%, will give you a 90% chance of having enough [...]

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There are many changes for Roth IRAs in 2008, so I want to enlighten you to them. 

People are able to contribute $5k/year without being 50. If you are 50, you can save an additional $1k or $6k total.
Income limits are increased for contributing to a Roth IRA, $101k for singles and $159k for married filing jointly (the [...]

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Should you ever pass up the 401k match?  According to Dave Ramsey, yes when you are focusing on paying off debt.  However Dave Ramsey does give the caveat that it shouldn’t be done if you are paying off debt for longer than 18-24 months. 
 I think passing up a 401k match is crazy.  You can never [...]

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Well on Friday Bear Stearns announced it bankruptcy. This forced the Federal Reserve to convene an emergency meeting, at which they cut interest rates by 1/4 point. And a deal was struck between JP Morgan and Bear Sterns to be acquired with help from the Federal Reserve.
But that’s not the bad news. [...]

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Turns out the reason the world markets fell last Monday was due to the selling of stocks by a Rogue Trader called Jerome Kerviel. This man caused panic in the US Federal Reserve, which caused the abrupt rate cut on Tuesday.
What happened? Well this French Trader somehow managed to invest his company’s [...]

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The Federal Reserve cut interest rates yesterday by 3/4 of a point. That’s a rather large cut. The cuts applied to prime, which impacts how much people pay interest on CC, auto loans, home equity lines of credit, etc. There is speculation about what the Federal Reserve will do at it’s normal meeting at the [...]

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I don’t mind investing in Bond Index mutual funds. However, right now we don’t invest in Bonds. Having bonds usually stabilizes a portfolio and doesn’t decrease the returns by very much. However the reason we’re not doing bonds right now, is because we have have a heavy cash position at any given time. The reason [...]

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By the way I’m not an investment guru or anything like that. I am not involved in finance at all. This is just something DH and I cooked up over the weekend for our plans for 2008. We’re going to bank on the US dollar dropping maybe 10%. And because of this we’re going to [...]

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