The Sun's Financial Diary

If you are looking for the hottest jobs in the hottest markets in the nation, you will have to go south. According to the latest issue of Business 2.0, 14 out of 15 fast growing job markets in US are located in the southern states, with Florida hosting 5 of them.

Based on a 2-year job-growth [...]

Last week the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed above 13,000 points for the first time on April 25, 2007. Since then, the index has been setting record highs every day. The last time the Dow reached a milestone was on October 20, 2006, when it broke the 12,000 mark. That’s only 6 months and 5 [...]

Articles on this Diary are sometimes mentioned by other bloggers when they wrote related contents or have a blog roundup. To express my appreciation of the links, I am starting a new Links to Links here every Sunday to bring up what have been mentioned by others in the past week.
Here are some mentions of [...]

As the earning season shifts to high gear, it won’t be a bad idea to take a look at how the economy and the markets have done in general in the first quarter in addition to individual companies. If that’s what you are looking for, then Jeremy at Generation X Finance has two posts that [...]

Here’s another bonus offer from Citi card.
Apply for a Citi Professional Card and get 10,000 bonus ThankYou Points after your first purchase that can then be redeemed for a $100 gift card.

Get 3 ThankYou Points for every dollar you spend at restaurants, gas stations, on auto rentals and at certain office supply merchants.
Get 1 point [...]

HSBC is currently running a promotion for its Premium Money Market Account. If you open a new HSBC Premium Money Market Plus Savings Account with an initial deposit of $3,000 from till May 31, 2007, you can get a $50 bonus. Features of the money market account:

No monthly maintenance fee
No minimum balance
Tiered money market rate

And [...]

Friday night readings:

Free Money Finance joins the discussion on whether the government should bail out the subprime lenders and goes on to ask “Can we please have some more rersonal responsibility in our finances?”

Five Cents Nickel shares his experience on saving money by asking for some extra discount. Why stop at getting a “Match” [...]

Last night when I called American Express to dispute the seemingly never ending charges on my Costco card from Netherlands (yes, it came again and AMEX only told me to be [more] patient after 8 weeks of investigation), I took the first step toward simplifying our finance by asking AMEX to close one of my [...]

Good news mutual fund investors!
Low-cost mutual fund giant Vanguard announced today that it’s simplifying its fee structure by replacing four fees with one account service fee. According to the announcement, effective April 26, 2007, the following four $10 annual fees will be eliminated:

The custodial fee on traditional IRAs, Roth IRAs, and SEP–IRAs with a balance [...]

Ben at Money Smart Life is hosting the second edition of What’s Your Money Question? this week (the first edition is right here) and this time the questions asked is
Is there such thing as saving too much money in an emergency fund? What’s the best place to keep the money you do save so it [...]