The Sun's Financial Diary

Morningstar today has an excellent article that offers tips for year-end personal finance checkup. Following is the summary. To read the full article by Sue Stevens, click here. 1. Supercharge Your Portfolio Rebalance: Keep your target asset allocations. Net gains and losses: Offset gains by selling losers. Check year-dnd fund distributions: Buy a fund after [...]

Update: If you are looking for reference codes to open an ING Direct account, check out the master list of ING Direct $25 bonus referral links.  If you open an ING Direct Savings account with any of links and make a deposit of at least $250, you will receive a $25 bonus and the referrer, [...]

Back in July, I learned from Scottrade, which holds my Roth IRA account, that one of my favorite Vanguard funds, Vanguard Wellington fund (VWELX), is closed to investors who invest in the fund through a brokerage firm. I have been investing in the fund since 2001 and have no plan to give up my positions. [...]

Yesterday, I heard that Emigrant Direct is to lower its savings rate. It was kind of surprise because I also have an account with Emigrant Direct and I didn’t get any notice about their rate change. Last night when I logged into my account in preparation of this month’s balance sheet, the savings rate was [...]

Last night when I logged into my Emigrant Direct account, the savings rate was still at 5.15%, the same as the past four months. However, when I checked again this morning, the rate dropped to 5.05%, matching the offer from HSBC. Though the rate is not attractive as it used to be, it’s still one [...]

Today, the Dow made the second attempt in as many days to surpass and stay above its all time high of 11722.98, set on January 14, 2000. With only five points away when it closed yesterday, that magic number seemed so close that nobody would doubt it was there for the taking. Yet, when all [...]

I started to take the paid-to-blog opportunities provided by PayPerPost last month. Yesterday, I received my first payment via Paypal from PPP for an entry I wrote a month ago. Yes! Actually, at the beginning, I was a little skeptical about PPP. My feeling is much more positive now, however, as I believe it is [...]

Microsoft is offering Office Live Basics for free. What this free service offered includes: A company domain name A hosted Web site with 30 MB of storage Five free e-mail accounts with 2 GB of storage each 10 MB E-mail attachment limit 10 GB/month data transfer (bandwidth) Basic Web site traffic reports If you want [...]