Living for today - Planning for Tomorrow
I’ve always like Ben Stein. The guy is just plain smart. I’ll always think of him as the teacher in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, but over the years, I’ve also come to think of him as an intelligent investor. In Ben’s latest post he talks about two different friends of his. One spends his days working and buying cars and facing the impact of poor
As I sat reading the Sunday paper yesterday, I found an article that talks about Motorola cutting out their pension. Approximately two years ago, Motorola stopped offering pensions to new employees. Now, they are changing the way the benefits are calculated for current employees which will result in smaller pensions for 24,000 of their workers. Just one more example of why we each have to
MyMoneyBlog has done some great posting about the average spending habits of people. I always find it fascinating to see how people split up their budgets. I guess it’s a bit of financial voyeurism, but it is very informative. Jonathon also had a post a few days ago that discussed this further so scroll down on his site once you get through this article. NCN
I was reading an article recently that mentioned investors are looking for Best Buy to buy back some of their outstanding stock rather than buy other companies. I would say that their track record of buying companies isn’t exaclty great considering they dumped a ton of money in to their Musicland purchase a few years ago and then later gave the company away as long
I just read an interesting article here that discusses the current economy and the struggles of being young in it. My overall observation is that I seem to be reading more and more articles like this. The author talks about the aging baby boomer population and hints at some of the issues that are sure to come as more and more of this “bubble” in
I was driving by the gas station today and looked at the cheapest gas on the sign. It was $3.29 a gallon. What I find interesting is the last time gas was $3.29 a gallon, the whole nation was screaming bloody murder. Now, rather than scream, everyone seems to be just sucking it up and paying the price. It’s interesting how we slowly aclimate to
Here I am, sitting pretty with a 5.75% fixed rate 30 year mortgage. Sure, I could have gotten a little better rate when the mortgage rates were at their bottom, but I didn’t. Overall, I’m not complaining about the rate I’ve got. At least it’s a reasonable rate and it’s fixed. I don’t have to worry about rate adjustments every 6 months, or payments that
Well, I suppose it had to be too good to be true. I posted my “Top 13 Money Saving Ideas Of All Time” and one of those tips was to only use two squares of toilet paper. Then, only days later, Sheryl Crow comes out and says that you should only use one square of toilet paper. (Talk about extreme). Well, apparently Sheryl was just
After signing up for the Ohio state sponsored 529 plan, I faced another decision. How would I allocate the money that I am investing each month? I wanted to choose index type funds for their low expense ratios and diversified approach, but I also wanted to be sure I had exposure in more than one market segment. For me, I’ve found that I’m most comfortable
If you are young like me, you’ve probably stopped and wondered whether the entitlement programs of today will be here tomorrow when you need it. I’ve often thought about what my reality will look like in the future. I’m worried that the programs that my parents have been able to use won’t be around for me. Scott Burns has a great post about the state