The Money Writers

Original Post on The Sun’s Financial Diary
What are My Investments and How are They Doing So Far?
I have talked about my investments many times in the past and shared with everybody what I was investing as well as performance of my portfolios. The last time when I got into details of my investments was [...]

photo credit: HAMED MASOUMI
For this Monday morning, The Money Writers decided to start you off with a cheerful bit of Monday reading - namely, how did our investments fare year to date? We’re a group of people who take our investments seriously, so we ought to have a pretty good take on the market. [...]

Mid year is a great time to review your portfolio and asset allocation. It’s the first task I listed in 10 Important Tasks for Your Mid Year Checkup.
Since we’ve had a few big changes in our life lately, we’ve tweaked our portfolio to account for the new lifestyle. Here’s a closer look into our [...]

This week The Money Writers are doing a little group project in highlighting and analyzing our investments. It is interesting to see how different the portfolios strategies being used stack up against each other. The participants and YTD results of this project are:

Brip Blap: -9.85%
Lazy Man: -7.22%
Million Dollar Journey: -1.35%
Money Smart Life: - a lot
My [...]

Last time I filled up my gas tank it cost me $64.28. As I was standing there at the pump I started thinking.
I realized I had absolutely no idea why the price of gas was so high.
I mean sure, I get emails from MSN money every day telling me that oil hit a [...]

This may sound crazy but I haven’t looked at the peformance of our investments in quite some time.   When one of the Money Writers suggested we all do an overview of our of holdings I realized how long it had been and was afraid of what I’d see when I logged into our accounts.
My fears [...]

I spent a good part of this week with my car in the shop. Since it’s a used Cadillac the entire front end pretty much has to be torn off any time we need to repair something, and that’s frustrating for me since I am used to doing my own repairs whenever possible.
This time [...]

Our stock portfolio is languishing; how is yours doing?
I haven’t discussed our portfolio for some time now — the last time I reported on it was many many months ago, and I’ve got an excuse. I was simply not excited about letting you all know how much money we’ve lost since my last formal portfolio [...]

I’m a little past due but it’s time to do a mid year portfolio check up. TheMoneyWriters came up with the idea of doing a portfolio update to see how we are all doing thus far. Honestly, I would be surprised to see anyone with any significant portfolio growth at this point in [...]

Thanks to Five Cents Ten Cents, I decided to create some fun art work using money words and other tags we often use around here . This cool word art is by Wordle, where you can make your very own beautiful word cloud.

Neat huh?
Also, I received a message from The Wild Investor [...]

My wife and I went to Los Angeles a couple of weeks ago and spent a little time in Disneyland. One of the most interesting things I saw was a High School Musical 2 stage that was on wheels. It would come rolling through the park 2-3 times a day and put on a 30-45 minute show at the front of the park. A group of teenagers/young adults would jump off the stage and perform songs from High School Musical. It’s all very good, and it was a fine show.
As my wife was grooving along to [...]

In our last post on commodities investing we talked about why you might want to start investing in commodities, and what a few of the investment options were.This time around we’re going to take a closer look at commodity Exchange Traded Funds (ETF’s.) and how to research them.
When you decide to invest in a commodity [...]

Original Post on The Sun’s Financial Diary
IGoChecking, IGoBanking’s Checking Account, Offers 2.65% APY
IGoBanking is one of the online banks that I used quite often in the past, until recently I switched to Capital One/FNBO Direct because IGoBanking’s rate, at 3.28% APY, is no longer attractive comparing to others.
Early this week, I received an email from [...]

It has been a busy week around here, and I had failed to get out one of the posts that I had scheduled. But that’s okay, that just means more posts next week. You’ll also want to be on the lookout for group writing project that The Money Writers is putting together. I think it [...]

This accidental entrepreneur is trying her hand at a small business.

How did I get started on the self-employment track? By accident. And that’s because I’m not really much of a risk taker when it comes to my career and income. I’m much more willing to take risks with investments, yes. But [...]

One of the best ways to accomplish something is to break it down into small, manageable parts. Complete these small parts and soon you’ll have your goal accomplished. For 2008, I thought I’d back on what my goals were and how I’ve done at accomplishing them. Please put on your seat belt, this could get ugly.
At the beginning of the year, I actually set 2 sets of goals, one if I worked full-time and one if I focused on blogging and other online businesses. Since I’ve been focusing on the other online businesses, I’ll ignore the [...]

It’s Friday! And you know what that means… it’s Free Money Friday!
Big Crumbs Cash Back
BigCrumbs is a free program to let you earn cash back for online shopping at various stores. Some of my favorite retailers that they give cash back are Target, Buy.com, and Old Navy. So far we’ve earned $99.16!
When to Use [...]

What does investing in natural resources mean?
When you choose to invest in natural resources (also known as commodities) you are investing in the building blocks of civilization.
In other words, commodities are materials that we use to make the finished products that we buy. Fritos are not a commodity, but the corn they are made [...]

photo credit: VideogameVisionary.com
Early in my career one of my manager imparted this little bit of corporate wisdom to me: there are two types of people in the world, “big picture people” and “small picture people”. These two types of people were complimentary but had wildly different skill sets and worldviews.
Big picture people
In a [...]

A quick reminder that today @ 5pm EST is the deadline to enter in The Answer - book giveaway.
The Restaurant Blogger writes about some memorable customers, good and bad!
Generation X Finance writes about Top 12 Money Mistakes Most People Make.
Canadian Dream explains why government bailouts don’t work.
Lazy Man and Money has a great article that [...]

Original Post on The Sun’s Financial Diary
A 250,000,000 Dollar Bill
I was browsing Wikipedia today and noticed an article Zimbabwean dollar. Then there’s an image of a $250,000,000 Zimbabwe bearer cheque.

Right, that’s $250 million dollars!
With monthly inflation rate at 1,063,572.6% in May, no wonder they need a huge bill.
—Check Out These Related Articles:Hello, Lincoln!My Best2006 4-Week [...]

Original Post on The Sun’s Financial Diary
HSBC Direct 3.50% APY Promotion Extended
In early June, HSBC Direct rolled out a promotion for its online savings account with 3.50% APY. While the rate was decent, it’s only good tile August 15, that’s less than one and a half months. I don’t really know how well the promotion [...]

A family member who is very close to me is leaving the United States for good to move to Singapore today. He’s leaving with his wife and two kids in tow to start anew in a foreign land, and the reason? Work opportunities.
Sounds a little strange, don’t you think? That someone who’s [...]

Original Post on The Sun’s Financial Diary
Need a Budget? Google Can Help
I don’t budget. Not that it’s bad or useless or anything, but because I don’t think it’s necessary for me. If the purpose of budgeting is to have spending under control and live below my means, then I am there already. Sure budgeting can [...]

Well, I’m not sure exactly what to call it: retired, semi-retired, quit, took a leave of absence, became a stay at home mom, became a professional blogger. Whatever “it” is… I’m done. I’m going to start withdrawing from my retirement accounts, hang out with my kids more and write a few mornings each week.
Getting [...]