(This was supposed to be published last Friday, but I must have hit the wrong button. Why? It will make more sense when you read the first bullet of the non-financial thoughts of the week.)
Financial thoughts of the week:
- Loyal reader Shaun Noonan wrote me about his start-up company, Gimmie Gimmie, I Want. The idea behind it is that you can create a wish list and others pool money towards a gift. It’s a great idea, but I was sure I heard of it before. After a little research it sounds quite a bit like Fundable.com. The difference? It seems geared towards smaller groups and possibly children (especially with the name). It also doesn’t take 7% off the top like Fundable. It’s completely ad sponsored. Looks like I’m not the only one with dreams of an alternative income streams.
- I mentioned my car accident earlier today. I’m really looking forward to spending time with a sub-par replacement. In addition, I appreciated spending an hour on the phone with claims agents today. I’ll also appreciate the hour of getting the estimate done later today. It just feels like a lot of uncompensated hassle for me.
- I’ve had a “roll-over 401k plan” on my to-do list for a few weeks now. Every time, I get close something comes up to supplant it on my list.
Here are my non-financial thoughts of this week:
- I’ve been fighting a cold the last three days. I’ve gone through a whole box of zinc lozenges. This cold has prevented me from doing half of the things on my to-do list for the week.
- Baseball season is about to start. Since I haven’t seen one Red Sox spring training game or even read much about the team, it doesn’t feel like spring. Happily Slingbox came out their public beta of their Palm 700P client, so I can watch and/or listen to the games on my cell phone. It’s amazing that just a few years ago I wouldn’t be able to see the game at all from San Francisco. Now I can see it while walking down the street. I don’t even have to pay a subscription to do this – wow.
I’m in the process of rolling my old 401K into my current 401k. It’s years overdue. The whole process is rather infuriating. There are lots of documentation requirements for what I assume will be a direct 401k to 401k rollover. I just had my check sent back to me because of the lack of documentation, and I thought I had everthing, but I missed the “distribution notice.” I though that was the documenation (labeled “distribution notice”) indicating my account was coming from a eligible 401K source, but it was actually the notice specifying that my distrubition was non-taxable (the top stub of the check). Either way i have to send it to them again…
Thanks mentioning my site, Lazy. Hopefully some folks will find it useful.. especially those in the high school/early college age range.
Yeah, and with regard to baseball and spring, you’re not alone. It’s snowing right at the moment here in Boston if it’s any consolation. Gotta love it..
Ten years after the last Boston April Snow Storm? Interesting…
good reminder – i need to decide whether to do a 401k rollover too!
401k plans usually have high fees but atleast i can’t mess around with them.
If I keep the money there, i know I’ll have something in retirement. If I have
to self manage it, there is always a chance I’ll mis-manage it!