The Sun's Financial Diary

I mentioned in my previous post that I have made some changes to how we invest our money this year and one of them was starting to contribute to Roth IRA accounts again, though we don’t qualify to make direct contributions. The advantage of Roth IRA over Traditional IRA has been discussed extensively, such as tax [...]

This time last year, I left my previous employer after nearly three years. With the new job, there were quite some changes in addition to new responsibilities at work. Among them, rolling over my old 401(K) plan to an IRA account was the last item on the to-do list and I didn’t do the rollover [...]

We don’t get a lot of mail from the government. The one that we did get in the past were our Social Security benefit statement that arrived at our house every year. Since the statements were only issued on an annual basis, we didn’t pay any attention to them until they were in our hands, [...]

As you have already known the 2011 tax deadline is April 17th, which means it’s not only the due date to file 2011 income taxes, but also the last day to make 2011 IRA contributions and take advantage of last year’s tax deduction, if eligible, not to mention saving for the future. So if you are [...]

At the beginning of this month, Congress was finally able to hammer out a compromise to the debt resolution standoff that had split the two political parties quite divisively over the last several months.  The agreement is far from a perfect solution and is already drawing criticism from both sides but it does prevent the [...]

My parents have been retired for a good dozen years or so now.  They’re your typical middle class working couple.  They worked hard for many years.  Always made sure my brother and I had what we needed.  Helped put us both through college as much as they were able.  They’re the textbook definition of a [...]

With the rise in unemployment over the last couple of years, we’ve seen thousands of workers saying goodbye to their employers and hitting the streets.  While it may not be the top thing on their mind if they’ve been laid off, many of these folks have 401(k)s or 403(b)s with their old work that they’ll [...]

When people dream of retirement, many of them think of sipping drinks on the beach of some warm locale.  For some of them, that warm locale is located thousands of miles away. The idea of retiring abroad holds greats appeal for many not just because of the warm weather, great food, picturesque views and rich [...]