The Sun’s Financial Diary

After a quite month of February because of the winter blizzards, we are back in house-hunting again as the weather turns warmer. The market also seems to be more active now than the first two months. We went to a few open houses this weekend in our area and found a couple of nice houses. [...]

Last week, I ran a TurboTax and H&R Block At Home giveaway. Perhaps many people have filed their taxes already, the giveaway only received moderate response as a total of 17 readers entered the contest. Still, I am glad that five of them can file their taxes, both federal and state, for free [...]

Today is a special day, a very special day. It’s Valentine’s day. It’s our daughter’s birthday. And, coincidently, it’s also the Chinese New Year, The Year of Tiger! All on the same day, on the weekend, after the snow storms of the past two weeks. This doesn’t happen very often as I know, so we [...]

I don’t know what it was like before, but for the first winter we are in Virginia, the snow we got so far was way too much, including 3 in just last week. Last December, we were lucky that we avoided the mess when we left town before last major storm hit. Not this time [...]

Yes, we are buying a house!
We have been looking since last December. After the new year, we went to a few open houses in this area, but found one we really like. Then early this week, some new listings in a very nice, gated community came up, all short sales. Since our agent lives in [...]

Over the weekend, I did a major upgrade of the site, moving from a shared server at Media Temple, where this site is hosted, to a dedicated virtual server. As I noticed in the past 10 days, the site was have a lot of problems, particularly that the pages were loaded very slowly and I [...]

So the holiday season is finally over. How was yours?
I took some time off from work this week to take the kids around as they were also having their winter break. We first make a trip to the Great Wolf Waterpark in Pennsylvania last week after the big snow storm. Since it’s an indoor park [...]

It has been quite a long time since the last upgrade of the site. Though I believe “Don’t fix it, if it ain’t broke” in general, I feel that the site is due for a facelift because the theme I have been using for the past two years is considered old. A lot of functions [...]

It’s not officially winter yet, but we had our first snow of the season already. It was a pretty big one yesterday with accumulation about 2 to 3 inches from what I saw. The kids were very cited about the first snow in the *new* place and wanted to build a snowman. But we only [...]

I got myself a little holiday gift today: An Acer Aspire One AOD250-1165 Netbook. It’s on sale at Target store at $199 today. I have been considering getting a netbook for some time, but not at the regular price of around $300, like those sold at Amazon.com. So when I saw the ad today, I [...]