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 wage [...]

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) I [...]

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 [...]