The Sun's Financial Diary

A couple of weeks ago, I ran a holiday giveaway of 10 Flip video cameras provided by American Express. Now that the holiday is over, it’s time to pick up winners. Actually, I was a little late in selecting who to receive the cameras because it wasn’t as easy as I initially thought. Anyway, after [...]

In case you forgot, today, July 24, 2009, the Federal minimum wage goes up to $7.25/hour from last year’s $6.55/hour. Following is a plot of historical Federal minimum wages from 1939 to 2009 (the blue line). In 1939, the minimum wage was only 30 cents. The next adjustment didn’t come until 1945 when the minimum [...]

We paid a sizable tax bill last April. One of the reasons was that I only made partial contribution to my 401(k) account in 2007. After changing my job middle of the year, I didn’t make any contribution to my retirement account because 1) there was a three-month delay preventing me from contributing immediately; 2) [...]

In the past few days, I heard a lot of news about the collapse of IndyMac bank and how anxious depositors arrived 4:00 am in the morning at the door of the bank’s branch offices in CA, hoping to get they hard earned money out as soon as possible. Though for most of the bank’s [...]

If you have read this blog long enough, you know that I have multiple brokerage accounts. If I have to count, then I have 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. Yes, a total of seven brokers. Of them, Firstrade, ShareBuilder and optionXpress have been idle for a long time after I moved money out [...]

Bush and Cheney did. According to the tax returns released to the public, Mr. and Mrs. Bush reported a total taxable income of $719,274 for the tax year 2007, an increase of $76,369, or 11.88%, than 2006. The vice president couple did much better last year than a year ago. Mr. and Mrs. Cheney’s 2007 [...]

I did. Did you? I called my broker Scottrade this morning when the markets opened, but had to wait nearly 20 minutes before my called was transferred to Scottrade’s national service center instead being answered by brokers at my local office. I never had problem contacting them before. When my call eventually went through, I [...]

Credit card network giant Visa Inc. is scheduled to go public on Wednesday, March 19th with its massive IPO, according to Marketwatch.com. The stock will be traded on NYSE under the symbol V. If Visa indeed goes ahead with its IPO in the middle of the current stock market turmoil, the offering will be the [...]