The Sun's Financial Diary

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 [...]

I should have done this last month for the mid-year checkup, but didn’t get time to record all the data and I had to delay the update to this month.
In the past, I have reviewed our investments, mainly taxable stock and mutual fund investment. The reason I skipped retirement investments before is that some of [...]

As I continue to review our finance, where I have covered trading, passive income, and net worth so far, the next item on my list is to examine our spending last year. The reason I want to check where our money went is the increase of our cash in 2008. Though the gain of nearly [...]

So far I have looked at how I traded stocks in 2008 and my passive income last year. Now it’s time to examine the progress on building up our net worth. Before I get to the details, one thing is for sure: It’s not pretty, as I have already shown through my monthly net worth [...]

OK, now it’s time to tally my passive incomes in 2008 as the second part of the 2008 Year In Review (the 2008 Stock Trades was the first part).
As you know, generating passive income, which I define as incomes without my active involvements, is one of the two goals that I have for my taxable [...]

I traded more stocks in 2008 than all I did in the past few years. Not that I suddenly became an active trader or anything like that. In fact, I have long been a buy and hold type of investor and I still am. Sometime, I felt that I may have been too buy-and-hold with [...]

It’s the middle of the year and it’s time for a mid-year investment portfolio checkup.
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 May 2007 [...]

When I posted our total passive income in 2007 in the middle of the month, one item missing from the calculation was interests earned from our purchases of 4-week T-bills in the first half of the year. Though I can go through all the transactions and figure out myself how much I have made, it [...]

One of the objectives we have is to generate incomes, dividends and capital gains, from our investments and hope one day these what I called passive incomes will replace the major part of our salaries before tapping into savings in our tax deferred accounts. In 2007, we continued to make progress in growing this part [...]

This is the third part of our Year End Review, in which I have so far gone through financial moves we made in 2007 and how what we have done affected our net worth, which includes both new money and price appreciation of our existing investments. The latter is the subject of this part [...]