By Sun on Aug 28, 2006 | In Banking, Bond, Investing, Personal finance | No Comments »
No, this is not for speeding, but for online transfers at my HSBC account.
I got a letter from HSBC tonight dated last Thursday, August 24th. The letter says my savings account at HSBC has a limit of six “preauthorized, automatic, computer or telephone transfer” in any month, calendar or statement cycle month and I have exceeded the limits.
Exceeded the limits? How?
I have been using HSBC for more than a year and this is the first time I got such a letter. I don’t think I did anything differently recently, except the extra T-Bills purchase I added this month. When I increased my weekly purchase of the 4-week T-Bills to $3000, I didn’t amend those previously scheduled purchase as TreasuryDirect doesn’t allow changes to be made on existing orders. So I simply created a separate order of $1000 per week. This, however, makes a total of eight transfers from my HSBC account to TreasuryDirect instead of four. To make sure this is indeed what happened, I logged into my HSBC account and counted the transfers made in August. Exactly seven and the last one was on August 24th, the date that TreasuryDirect withdrew funds for that week’s purchases. So that’s why.
Actually, I was thinking of deleting my existing orders when I added the new purchase. However, when I followed the Delete a scheduled purchase link under the Manage Direct menu, I was afraid that I have to delete some 30 existing orders one by one as it appeared I can only select one order at a time. That’s a lot of work to do! But today I have no choice but deleting all the transactions I have scheduled, even it means I have to do it one by one.
Well, things aren’t as bad as I thought. When I tried to delete one transaction, there was an option of either delete this specific one, or delete all the remaining repeat orders. I chose the latter and all my orders were gone!
Probably I should have tried last time, instead of being intimidated by potentially a large number of clicks required.
By Sun on Aug 28, 2006 | In 401(k), Personal finance | No Comments »
My wife has been with her current company for nearly five years and her employer offers a match for the first 6% of her 401(k) contributions. The only catch is the match is given in company stocks in the form a fund. Ever since she joined the company, she maxed out every year and now a sizable amount of her company stocks, while the resets are in Fidelity mutual funds. Last week, when reviewing her portfolio, we found that nearly 22% of her 401(k) is in her company’s stock fund! That’s a very high percentage and could be dangerous in the long term.
So we decided to trim the holding to 5 – 10%. When we tried to exchange the company stock fund to other mutual funds she currently holds, an error message popped up, saying employer sponsored contributions are not eligible for such transactions. Next day, my wife called Fidelity and was told that, according to the current rule, employees have to hold the company match portion before they are 50! That’s more than ten years away and anything could happen to the company during this awfully long period of time. One exception is that portion can be traded if the employee leaves the company. Fidelity also said the rule is currently under review and changes may be made. But nobody knows when that will happen. For now, my wife has to keep her company stocks for a while. A long, long while.
By Sun on Aug 28, 2006 | In Deals | No Comments »
When I first heard of Amazon’s grocery department, I wasn’t so sure what they were selling, but definitely not milk and fresh veggies. Those are what I considered as grocery. Last week I received a promotion email from Amazon with a $10 off of $49 or more coupon GROCERY2 for its grocery service. So I decided to give it a try. My daughter also emptied her cheerios box anyway.
When I searched “organic” in the grocery section, I was surprised that more than 1000 results turned out. That’s a huge inventory. Browsing though the search results, I found that most of the organic items are cereals, crackers, and soups. I think this is a good strategy as the local grocery stores are unlikely to have such a large collection. I went through every page of the search results and put two items in my shopping cart: Nature’s Path Organic Crackers (8-oz box, pack of 12) for $24.29 and Cascadian Farms Cereal Purely O’s (10-oz box, pack of 6) for $16.14, after the coupon savings (actually these two items were in two separate orders with other items in order to reach the $49 minimum spending for the coupon). My order arrived several days later and my daughter likes the cracker and cereal. To get an idea of my savings, I went to my local ShopRite yesterday and found that the same Nature’s Path organic cracker is priced at $4.49 a box and $3.49 for a 12-oz box of Cascadian Farms cereal.
The coupon code is still valid if you also want to do some grocery shopping at Amazon.
By Sun on Aug 26, 2006 | In Others, Blog | No Comments »
When I first inserted my Google AdSense code into the blog template, I just couldn’t see any! The Google ad refused to show up no matter where I put it. I suspected that I didn’t do it right, I even emailed Google and Blogger about the problem.
Well, it turned out that it’s the Adblock extension of my Firefox browser that blocked the ads! If I disable the Adblock, the ads are right in front of me (wow there are sure a lot of ads on almost every website). Today I came cross a discussion of what to do if you accidentally hit your own Google ads, I realized that this actually is a bonus for me. This is no way I can click my own ads.
They are simply not there for me to click!
On the other hand, however, if everybody uses Firefox and installs the extension, is it possible that AdSense will no longer make any sense?
By Sun on Aug 26, 2006 | In Tools, Investing | No Comments »
I have been using Quicken to track my investments for a while. After started with Microsoft Money, I switched to Quicken in 2003. Ever since, Quicken has been my favorite (though I also use Excel spreadsheet). Currently, I use Quicken to track investments, bank accounts, credit cards, and loans.
For the 2007 version, the most noticeable change is the interface, a much nicer home window. The startup window now shows the balance of the current month: the income, the expenses, and the remains. The data are extracted from transactions doweloaded from banks and credit cards.
Other improvements over the 2006 version which I used before the upgrade include:
- Better graphical presentation of charts;
- Detailed cashflow information;
- Local business rating with Zipingo.
However, the income and expenses numbers reported by Quicken shall not be taken as they are. I was shocked when I first saw my 5-figure income and expenses. Apparently, Quicken treats any deposit at my banks as income, even those transfered from my other banks. Equally, it reports all withdraws as expenses including those that are actually moved from one bank to another. This way, both the income and expenses are inflated, though the balance is not affected.
By Sun on Aug 25, 2006 | In Mutual fund, Investing | No Comments »
Good news for dividend investors. Morningstar.com reported today that Vangurad will launch Vanguard High Dividend Yield Index Fund in the fourth quarter of this year. The fund, which tracks FTSE High Dividend Yield Index, will also be available in ETF shares. The mutual fund will have an expense ratio of 0.40%.
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