The Sun’s Financial Diary

I bought a lot of individual stocks in 2009 in my brokerage accounts, mostly with Scottrade. Many of them were purchased before the market hit the bottom (now we can safely call it the bottom) in March. But those stocks were not all what I bought last year. In addition to stocks purchased here and [...]

When you live in a fun state to visit, like I do, you are frequently barraged with incoming guests. It starts with a simple phone call, “Hey, we’re on vacation in March and we are coming down to visit you . Mind if we bunk in the guest room?” Not wishing to ruin anyone’s great [...]

I bought a few American Express gift cards just before holiday last December because I thought they make good holiday gifts. Now AMEX is celebrating the upcoming Valentine’s Day and Chinese Lunar New Year, both are the same day, February 14th, with free shipping codes for their gift cards. In addition to the classic cards, [...]

One of the more intriguing stories coming out of Capitol Hill recently has been the struggle over whether or not Ben Bernanke will (or perhaps more importantly should) be nominated for a second term as Chairman of the Federal Reserve.
To briefly recap events, President Obama announced in late 2009 that he would nominate Bernanke for [...]

Do you want to have a TradeKing brokerage account?
If you do, then here’s a chance for you to receive $50 to get started.
Discount online broker TradeKing is celebrating Ben Franklin’s birthday this year by offer a $100 bonus for existing users for every new customer they refer to TradeKing. Since I am already using [...]

This time last year, I created a list to track failed banks in 2009. On January 23, 2009 when I wrote the post, there was a total of 3 bank failures. At that time, I also compared 2009 with 2008, the first full year of this recession when 25 banks were shut down. I was [...]

Yes, we are buying a house!
We have been looking since last December. After the new year, we went to a few open houses in this area, but found one we really like. Then early this week, some new listings in a very nice, gated community came up, all short sales. Since our agent lives in [...]

Sometimes in our quest to save money we make… well… bad decisions. We try to save money by doing repairs ourselves or we contract inexperienced workers to do work around our home for us. These decisions may seem smart when you see a full wallet after your repair or other service is done, but they [...]

ChoiceTrade, headquartered in Central New Jersey, is another online discount broker which offers stock and options trading at a discounted price (ChoiceTrade is one of the discount brokers highlighted in my discount broker comparison post). The current trading commission at ChoiceTrade is $5 per online stock trade with no limit on the size of the [...]

This topic has been discussed many times in the past. In my last post in April 2009, I mentioned that despite the apparent lower costs, index funds remains unpopular among investors, accounting for only 12% of the total equity mutual fund assets as of 2007. There are many reasons that investors turn their back on [...]