The Sun's Financial Diary

Let’s face it, what we are seeing now are not pretty: turmoil in the financial market, slumping home value, slowing consumer spending, rising unemployment rate, and falling stock prices. The talks of a possible recession, if we are not already in it as some people have argued, are getting louder and louder these days as [...]

Credit card companies’ interest rate policy is the subject of a congressional hearing this week as executives from major credit card issuers went to Capital Hill to defend their actions on rising card member’s interest rates, even when they had good credit history. A USA Today story yesterday portraits a victim, Janet Hard, who paid [...]

Last week I posted an entry on what it means to be a better investor nowadays after reading an article from Jason Zweig. The main message Mr. Zweig is sending is that investors will gain more by reducing investment costs. For average Joe and Jane, the simplest way to achieve that is using index funds. [...]

[poll=5] The reason I want to conduct this survey is to see whether the change of a person’s circumstance will alter his/her regular investment, though it’s only a small amount. Last month, I wrote a piece on investing and paying credit card debt. The scenario that I created in that post may not be as [...]

So far I have conducted three polls on this site, one about paying mortgage with credit cards is still ongoing and two were closed. The reason I like to run opinion polls is to get real life people’s opinions on issues that are closely related to personal finance, in addition to getting the news from [...]

A couple of days ago, American Express announced a program that will allow qualified cardmembers to pay mortgages with their AMEX credit cards. From comments left at my post, I can see opinions on this issue is as polarized as using credit cards itself: there are people like me who use credit cards all the [...]

Yesterday Flexo at Consumerism Commentary posted an article on what financial documents are necessary for young families. Top the must-have list is will. This isn’t the first time I saw recommendation of having a will as part of estate planning and there is little doubt on why everybody should have one. However, we never really [...]