The Sun's Financial Diary

To me, things never went well when transferring an account. It took me two months to transfer my Roth IRA from Scottrade to Vanguard last time because of various errors at both Scottrade and Vanguard. Now the same problem is happening again with Zecco. Yesterday, I got an alert from ShareBuilder, saying there’s an important [...]

In the July issue of Financial Planning magazine, there’s an article about including alternative investments such as energy, precious metal, real estate, etc, in portfolio and how they will impact the overall returns of portfolios with and without these assets. This isn’t the first time I read papers that argue the case of having commodities, [...]

When I was in the process of getting a Zecco trading account a couple of weeks ago, it really surprised me when Zecco took back the two small trial deposits from my checking account after the account verification process was completed. The total of 40 cents was nothing, but the action itself speaks more than [...]

Last week I posted an entry on transferring my account at ShareBuilder to Zecco. After the post was published, I got an email from Drew who is interested in some more information about the transfer: I enjoyed your current posts on Zecco and moving from ShareBuilder to Zecco. I currently have a portfolio with ShareBuilder [...]

As we are approaching the half-year mark, do you plan to do any adjustment of your portfolio? I usually don’t make any change on our investments in the middle of the year. Any rebalancing will happen when the full year ends as I always feel the stock markets will do better in the second half [...]

Last December I bought some P&G shares through their direct stock purchase program as part of my income-generating portfolio. After comparing what the company charges for direct investment against commissions at ShareBuilder, I decided to go with the company instead of using ShareBuilder. Though the cost of each trade is quite low when buying a [...]

What’s your investment objective? My ultimate goal is to replace a majority of our pre-retirement income, salaries from our day jobs, by incomes generated from our investments when we retire (we still have 20+ years to go). Since neither of us has a pension plan (my wife used to have one with her employer, but [...]

This isn’t exactly the kind of simplifications I have planed to make as I also opened an new account, but today I sent out the paperwork to move the assets in my ShareBuilder account to Zecco. I have used ShareBuilder for a little over a year and every month I transfered $200 to the account [...]