Archive for September, 2006
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Too Many Transit Systems in San Francisco
I have to make a trip from the peninsula to San Francisco tonight. There is a very helpful website, but it’s still going to be difficult to figure out. I plugged in my origin and destination in their trip planner and it looks like it’s going to take me at least 3 changes [...]
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An Expensive New Toy or Great Tool?
I went and got a Magellan Roadmate 3000T (scroll down for the exact model). It was onsale for $415 via an online retailer. I have to admit that if time is money, this is going to be a very smart purchase. My sense of direction is that bad. Add in [...]
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Auto-enrollment for 401(k) Thought.
So I just saw that the Department of Labor approved auto-enrollment for 401(k) plans. I hadn’t been following this very closely, but it seems that when you start a new a company can enroll you in their 401(k) automatically. I think it will be helpful for many people, but it also seems [...]
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That’s What I’ll do – Value Menu!
I’ve noticed that McDonald’s is playing up it’s value menu offering. At least locally, they have radio commercials depicting a gentleman saving for a diamond ring and solving his problem by eating the value menu. I think at the end he even ditches the girl so that he can by even more double [...]
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I am idiot…
I owe you all a ton of apologies. I had comments enabled and never knew how to moderate them. Now, I know. I’m sorry everyone. Now to go back and comment on all the comments.
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How Much Is My 401(k) Plan Worth?
It turns out that my new company doesn’t offer a 401(k) plan. This was a little alarming. I can’t really think of a reason why a company wouldn’t offer one. My last company of 20 employees did. It didn’t match any of my contributions, but at least I could defer my taxes.
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Old Condo is Almost Rented
As I’ve mentioned in the past, a surprise opportunity to relocate from Boston to Silicon Valley came across my doorstep. That left me with a decision to make about my condo. I had bought it in the summer of 2004 and have a fairly good mortgage rate on it. Unfortunately, if I [...]
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Monthly Necessary Expenses
Jane Dough of Boston Gal’s Open Wallet references an article about keeping your mandatory expenses to a minimum. It seems that you should keep your ratio of take home pay to expenses under 50%. I did a look at mine and they are at 35.35%. I was helped out by splitting [...]
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My New Hypothetical Asset Allocation…
In my previous post, I detailed how I would allocate a hypothetical $100,000 portfolio. I had a few goals in mind when I was creating the portfolio:
Keep expenses low. Some expense ratios are over 1%, which is a high price to pay if your balanced portfolio returns 8-10% a year.
I’m young, so I [...] -
Results From a 4.25 Year Asset Allocation Experiment
City Girl ’s Financial Blog has reminded me about asset allocation. Not that one should ever forget about asset allocation, but I forgot about July 31, 2002. It’s when I decided the market was at a low. I picked that time to start a Yahoo Finance Portfolio of $100,000 to see how it [...]
