The Sun's Financial Diary

It’s the one I mentioned two weeks ago, a 4 bedroom, 3.5 bath single family house with finished basement in a gated community, a place we both like a lot.
There was a $55K difference between the listed price and the price we first offered. Based on the past sale prices of similar houses in that [...]

After the streak of 10 straight monthly increase was snapped in January, the growth of our net worth returned last month as the overall stock market recovered from January’s poor performance. Even though the gain wasn’t big enough to offset January’s market loss, it was big enough to put net worth to a new high [...]

I know sooner or later, this is going to happen.
Since last March, our net worth has ridden the recovering stock market higher and higher month after month, going up like a straight line from March to December. While I was very happy with the growth of our wealth on paper, I know every well that [...]

In the last week or so, we started to receive tax documents for filing our 2009 income taxes. At the around the same time, I also got email notifications from credit card issuers that the 2009 Year-End summaries of our credit card spending are also available for us to view. While we are waiting for [...]

How time flies.
Now that 2009 is officially in the books, it’s time to look back last month and the whole last year to see where I was this time last year and where I am now.
Despite the 120-point drop of the Dow on the last trading day of the year, December 2009 turned out to [...]

Can’t believe it’s the last month of 2009 already.
November turned out to be a very good month for us, especially for our investments which so far have been the main driver of our net worth growth. Overall, the stock markets worked in our favor in November, with the Dow gaining 6.51%, the Nasdaq adding 4.86%, [...]

I feel that the last few days of October kind of ruined the whole month for investors. Even though the Dow closed above the physiologically important, but symbolic 10,000 mark for the first time in a year in October, the stock market sold off in the second half of the month. Major indices closed October [...]

It’s official. The house in New Jersey where we called home for more than five years is no longer our property.
Four months after we put the house on the market, the sale of the house was officially closed today. Though we haven’t got the money yet, all the paperwork are signed and the keys of [...]

Another solid month is in the books.
September didn’t turn out to be the month of market sell-off as I heard from some predictions when the month began. To the contrary, September was a good month for stock investors with all major indices finishing the month in positive territories: The Dow gained 2.2% for the month, [...]

Early last month, we moved from New Jersey to Virginia due to job changes. It was by far the longest relocation we had and a very stressful event because we basically had to deal with everything ourselves, from searching a new place in VA to the eventual 250-mile move. When all was done, we found [...]