The Sun’s Financial Diary

A surprise was in the mail last night: a gift from EmigrantDirect.
Nothing big or fancy, but I take it as a gesture from EmigrantDirect of being their customer for the past year.
So what's the gift? It is a small writing pad with my name printed on every page, the kind of gift that you [...]

Three years ago, when we bought our currently, we chose a 5-year ARM over fixed rate. The mainly reason was a favorable rate the ARM offered: a percentage point lower than 30-year fixed rate. At that time 5-year seemed far away and interest rates could only go lower. We were wrong on both.
With a little [...]

I ususally don't read very carefully the newsletter Fidelity sends to me as I see it as an advertisement. But an article in today's E-News got my attention. It's about how to take advantage of the new tax law passed in August to boost savings. Below is the summary of the article, click here for [...]

I read an article yesterday on the New York Times website about the potential privacy risk of no-swipe credit cards, those cards that don’t require manually swiping through a machine, therefore, no signature needed. For a customer with a no-swipe card (for example, the Blink card from Chase), all he/she needs to do is waving [...]

Due to the apparent delay of our Roth IRA transfer process at Vanguard, I decided to mail the checks ($1000 each) to Scottrade for our forth quarter Roth IRA contributions. When I started the transfer process at the end of last month, I thought it could be done before the next quarterly automatic investment date [...]

Just got off the phone with Vanguard and Scottrade regarding transferring part of my Roth IRA asset from Scottrade to Vanguard and the news wasn't pretty.
I submitted the paper work on September 29th and had expected to whole process to finish in October. According to Vanguard, the transfer can take up to four weeks, so [...]

Yesterday, an article appeared on Kiplinger offered a list of year-end financial tricks aimed to help us to be more organized and disciplined for our personal finance. Among the suggestions, the one that I like the most is "Put your savings on autopilot," and we have been doing that for quite a while. Here's our [...]

It's trick or treat time!
An article on Kiplinger's Personal Finance by Erin Burt offers ten year-end financial tricks that I think are helpful in getting people being disciplined in saving and spending. I especially like the idea of saving automatically and setting a fund for big expenses (auto insurance, vacation, or a high definition TV).
So, [...]

As we entered the last quarter of 2006, many of us will soon face the deadline of renewing the healthcare plan. I am not sure about you, but every year at this time, I had to spend days to go through all the paperwork to find the right plan and right doctor for my entire [...]

I usually don’t check my 401(k) account until the time to update the net worth and even at that time, I didn’t look at the return because, first, I simply forgot to check and, second, I won’t make any change before the year end, no matter how good or bad the return is. But tonight, [...]