Personal Financial Advice from a former Certified Financial Planner
The Top 10 Best Christmas Holiday Deal Websites. Want to go beyond those everyone-knows-about-them websites the regular news reports on? Here are the real places to get hot deals this Christmas, and all year round.
I’ll be moving the now hybrid version of Finance Gourmet to an all WordPress format. So, it will look very different soon. Comments on the market, selling the house, and my small business(es) coming tonight, and the rest of this week.
There are a lot of how to save money articles going around these days. I guess that is what people think about during tougher economic times. I stumbled across a pretty great one today. SooperCard For those of you not from one of the mountain states, King Soopers is a grocery store. The chain is owned by Kroger whom you may know better. Anyway, way back in the day, just like all the other grocery stores, King Soopers started a shopper card program where you got savings by using your card. The card is called a SooperCard. Now, like a lot of other people, I gave them fake information when I signed up because I was suspicious and didn’t want them selling my name or tracking how many Pop-Tarts I buy. Several years later, I’m a financial professional and much more astute on how the world of business works, and I now know that at best I was being naive. After all, the three credit bureaus gladly sell not only your name and address, but your credit score (not the exact score, but you can buy a list of people with over a 700, for example) and how you use …
The SEC became concerned that financial reporting and disclosure was in need of some smoothing out and improvement, so in true government fashion, it formed an advisory committee to explore ways to improve financial reporting for investors. You may recall that I mocked the whole thing based on the fact that A LOT of that complexity is actually the fault of the SEC and other assorted regulators who insist on constantly adding requirements of dubious value. However, making the system better is making the system better and I welcome the SEC advisory committee’s report even if most of what it does is to undo things the SEC has done before. So, without further ado, I will download the Advisory Committee’s report elegantly entitled: FINAL REPORT of the ADVISORY COMMITTEE on IMPROVEMENTS to FINANCIAL REPORTING to the UNITED STATES SECURITIES and EXCHANGE COMMISSION After quickly reading over the document I will report the recommendations here and … wait a second — So, the report is 120 pages long and then there are 48 pages of appendixes. Hmmm. Well I’ll get back to you a little later. I guess we won’t be improving things by making them any shorter and easier to …
Ok, technically, it isn’t greenmail, but the actions of Carl Icahn in regards to Yahoo! have been very reminiscent of the old strategy. Basically, Icahn used his fortune to buy up a large amount of Yahoo stock and then complained loudly in the media about the Yahoo board, specifically about their decision not to sell to Microsoft claiming that shareholder value was not maximized. What Icahn really means is that his short term investment has not paid off in a way that he would like and instead of admitting that perhaps he made a mistake, he blames Yahoo’s board for not selling out to Microsoft so he could squeeze a profit out of his position. But, is he right? Yahoo’s Value and Microsoft’s Offer Let’s be frank, Wall Street has never been a hyper-accurate barometer of a company’s true worth on any given day, but that inefficiency is what theoretically creates the profit potential in the markets. By finding and investing in a company that is improperly valued, you can reap the rewards when everyone else realizes that the company is wrongly valued and the price moves to make up for it. But, there in lies the rub. Everyone else …
I’ve written recently about our attempt to sell our home without a realtor using Iggyshouse.com. We used them because we got a free MLS listing and a place to upload a ton of description and pictures. Their site was down for a disturbingly long time in June and part of July but is back up for now. The only reason I’m not blasting them is that our MLS listing stayed up the whole time. Still, proceed with caution. There was some confusion about the MLS listings caused mostly by the way MLS operates. As a member of the general public, you can search MLS to your heart’s content, but you cannot directly contact the sellers. MLS does not list the contact information on any publicly available view of MLS, only on the version that you have to pay for. This is how MLS maintains its monopoly position and forces people to use realtors. In fact, one of the warnings from Iggyshouse is that it is against MLS rules to use pictures that have any contact info on them (because then you wouldn’t need a paying subscriber to get a phone number). So, your picture can’t have your phone number at …
Today’s inspiration comes courtesy of All Financial Matters (a solid blog with good hard numbers data) who notes that a Money Magazine article called “The Mole” discusses how just because a financial advisor says he puts his clients first doesn’t mean he does. Really? Did I miss something? If it says “I put my clients first” on an attorney’s website does that mean that he does, or does it depend on the attorney? Are there doctors who over bill your insurance company to boost their income? Does a waiter ever suggest a more expensive wine to increase his tip? I’m shocked, shocked, to find out there is gambling going on in here! All of this, of course, is why you need a good trusted financial advisor in the first place, but that is not why we come here today. I want to show you something from “behind the scenes” as the Mole says. Financial Advisors and Commissions Let’s make up a fake client with a $500,000 account to be invested. Let’s ignore all taxes and legal implications for the sake of simplicity and concentrate on commissions. We’ll also assume that the account value stays the same over the years for …
Unbelievable. I grabbed my trusty notebook this morning and wrote a post for the Finance Gourmet from one of the many topics I have listed in there. Basically, I wrote about how actually saving some money is more important than learning all the tricks to investing money, particularly when you don’t have much money to invest in the first place. Then, this afternoon I was (finally) going through my feeds that I had ignored in order to keeps from getting thrown off schedule by the 4th of July holiday and the associated vacation we took, I read this at The Simple Dollar which is pretty much the same concept. He spends some times showing you the numbers instead of relying on the workout analogy like I did. Anyway, check it out if you want to see more data.
Like trying to setup a fancy exercise routine before commiting to regular exercise sessions, trying to take on fancy investment ideas before building up solid savings is doomed to failure. Here is how to make it happen now.
That zero percent credit card offer might not be a good deal for you. Here is the trap, and how to avoid it.