Money Forward

There's something in the water in Orlando

noreply@blogger.com (MoneyFwd) — Sat, 05 May 2007 14:44:00 +0000

My wife and I went on vacation a little over a year ago to Orlando. We had never been to Disney World before and she really wanted to go, so we went for her birthday. Having never been there, I just went with the most obvious approach to getting everything, from hotel tickets to park tickets. I'm not so sure I got the best price.

Since then, every once in a while all I can think about it going back. It's not like I loved it or anything, but for some reason I want to go back. There must be something in the water. Anyway, this time around I'm probably going to check out this website where I can get the best prices on park tickets and entertinament tickets, including Disney park tickets and Universal Studios tickets. These tickets are surprisingly one of the most expensive parts of the whole trip, and any savings you can get is well worth it.

No wonder newspaper circulation is down

noreply@blogger.com (MoneyFwd) — Fri, 04 May 2007 13:03:00 +0000

Journalists like the one that wrote this article on Boston.com, could be one reason no one cares to read the news anymore. Why do they always have to talk to people who live nearby, or bystanders, or people that add NOTHING to the story, or even talk about totally irrelevant things.

The beginning of the article is fine, informative (sad and unfortunate), to the point, talking about a student who shot his roommate and then killed himself. Then they talk to some random person who's parents live nearby and instead of saying how sad it is that someone did this, and how bad that person must have been, she complains about students living in the neighborhood near the college causing trouble with partying, and how someone needs to do something about it. The person's thoughts are TOTALLY irrelevant, and outright selfish. The journalist (Katharine Webster) was trying for something and totally missed the point. Why do people have to try and do more than is needed, especially when it just screws up everything.

As a side note, if you choose to live near a college, you have to accept that college students are going to party, and there's going to be issues. If you don't like it, leave. If you expect a college not to grow, or to house all of their students, good luck. Most of the time, this isn't going to happen. Stop being blind.

My condolences to the family of the students and the people affected by this act.

Cell phones

noreply@blogger.com (MoneyFwd) — Fri, 04 May 2007 12:53:00 +0000

We're always surrounded by people that are addicted to their cell phones. That can't help but to wake up in the morning, call someone, and then stay on their phone most of the time they're alone. It's pretty sad. We used to do fine without cell phones, and now some people can't live without them. I wonder if they have ever shown a drop in depression or loneliness due to an increase use in cell phone. Someone should work on that study.

Any way, I don't care how lonely or important you are, if your cell phone is distracting you from doing things that affect others, i.e. driving, you should be banned from using it. This is why I ahve no problem with laws that restrict cell phone use. In addition, it may be nice to use one on a plane or subway, but it's kind of nice to have some quiet.. there's not enough quiet.

Update

noreply@blogger.com (MoneyFwd) — Fri, 04 May 2007 12:47:00 +0000

As expected, not much of a networth bump. Our retirement funds did pretty well and gained a chunk last month. Our savings dropped, although this was expected, and this month it will drop a lot more. I'm not worried about it. We have enough money for a few semesters of my tuition, my wife has started interviewing for jobs and making connections. So far we're doing well enough.

My experiment has still been going on, although I made end it early (June or July instead of November and December). It lost a little bit the day before the new month, so things went down slightly. I'm still pretty happy with it overall. I may end it early because we're considering moving, so I want our credit to be better before we have people looking at it to see if we can rent an apartment they have. It'll be a non-gain of a some money, but only like $300 or so. As for the stock portion, we'll probably pay it off using savings and keep the stocks until they have been held over a year. Depending on how I feel about them, we may or may not sell them after that point. I would just rather pay the 15% capital gains, rather than the higher tax amount.

Lately we've been too busy, with the semester ending and a lot of things going on, and upcoming trips. I just don't care too much about our money at the moment. So we're spending a bit, but all to keep sanity and enjoy life.

Vacations

noreply@blogger.com (MoneyFwd) — Sun, 22 Apr 2007 15:27:00 +0000

We definitely do not take enough vacations, mostly because they're so expensive. Although the hotel and rental car and flights are expensive, you at least know those prices before you leave. What gets you, is the cost of food. When we went on our honeymoon to Hawaii, the food was really expensive and we just didn't think about it before we left.

During our search to find a honeymoon location, we checked out a bunch of different sites for all inclusive resorts. There seemed to be a lot of good ones, but it was hard to search them all out. There is a nicely done site that I found recently that will help anyone find an all inclusive resort in most areas of the world. They say that you can ind a resort for up to 50% off. I didn't find the rates, but if you're interested in a place, it seems like they'll show you. The best part is, they have resorts from all of the major all inclusive resort companies. You can search by location, type of resort (couples only, families, adults only, adventure, etc.), or by the resort company.

We've definitely considered this type of vacation because then you're not surprised by the price of food. Plus, you know what you'll be getting before you even go since you'll be able to read up about the resort and all it has to offer. If this type of vacation is something you're interested in, check out the site. Vacations.net

Frugality

noreply@blogger.com (MoneyFwd) — Thu, 19 Apr 2007 23:57:00 +0000

Frugality definitely has it's perks, although it has it's place and time as well. For example, I went to my parents' house on Sunday and I noticed that had a cereal box of tasteeo's (right next to two boxes of honey nut cheerios). My (and even my brother's) first exclamation as "what the hell is that?" My dad of course kept insisting that there was no difference, but there is. Just get regular cheerios. It's well worth the price.

Another good example, beer. Good beer is well worth the price. Paying nothing for bad beer is not only an insult, but a waste of money. I did used to by Miller High Life, because at the corner liquor store in one of my old places, a 6-pack of 16 oz cans was like $4.50. That as well worth it when I was poor. But even when poor, if I had the time and motivation to drive, I had no problem paying more for good beer. Like tonight, I had a Stone Brewing Company, Vertical Epic. It was excellent, and well worth the price. Other beers well worth the price are most things from Magic Hat Brewing Company, and Alaskan Brewing Company.

Priorities

noreply@blogger.com (MoneyFwd) — Thu, 19 Apr 2007 16:14:00 +0000

School has been a priority for me financially, making sure I don't have to go further into debt to pay for my degree. So far I'm making it. Even better, I have enough to hold me over through possibly next spring or farther. It all depends on what classes I take and how much extras are going into savings.

Although it's a great feeling, I've decided that my wife and I don't enjoy life all that much. Sure you can enjoy life without spending money, but there are a lot of things I want to do that require money. So, instead of keeping my savings and being ready for several semesters of school, we've decided to at least take one soemwhat vacation. I say somewhat because it will be a trip back to where most of my friends are, and so it's really a visit rather than a 'sitting by the beach, drinking fancy drinks' type of vacation. Although it will cost some money and possibly make me have to find more money for next year's tuition, it will be well worth it. We'll have the money, so that's not a big deal. Plus we need to enojoy ourselves, and we've been so busy the past few months, that it will be a nice break from it all.

Although have money security is nice, it's worthless if you aren't enjoying yourself.

What can Brown do for me? Go out of business UPS, please.

noreply@blogger.com (MoneyFwd) — Sat, 14 Apr 2007 14:23:00 +0000

UPS, you're a terrible company. Never have I not had trouble with you. From terrible, useless customer service, to some of your incompetent delivery people(although I've never met a competent one, I don't want to assume they're all useless), to your unrealistic delivery policies and procedures.

Your company lacks common sense. It is unfortunate that you have to hire people and then not train them correctly, keeping them from being helpful to your customers. When someone has a delivery sheet, a valid license (even if it is from a different state, it is still valid), you should allow them to pick up their package. It was bad enough that someone was waiting specifically for your delivery person, yet when the package did not arrive and I called customer service, they lied to me saying someone tried to deliver the package and no one was there. SOMEONE WAS THERE. Then to waste my time and make me rush to your delivery center to pick up the package that should have been correctly delivered, and then deny me the package because my valid license with my name which is totally unique in the whole country, if not the world, does not have my in-state address? USELESS.

Or the policy that does not allow your dlivery people to deliver a package to a house with apartments, even if no signature was required and it could be left inside a door, and even if I say it is okay to do so. How many people can take a day off just to wait for a package? We work. Being home between 10 and 2 during the day to get a package is impossible.

Now your latest incompetence when you say you left my package on my front porch. First, I do not have a porch. Second, you obviously didn't leave it at my building since I was hope 15 minutes later and there was no package in site. It was pouring rain, I seriously doubt people were walking around stealing stuff. And who would want to steal this anyway? It isn't worth anything to 99% of the people out there. Plus, my neighborhood isn't like that.

What can Brown do for me? Stop delivering packages for companies I order from. I would request other companies to deliver it, but those requests often, unfortunately, get denied. Just go out of business, restructure, do something useful, because right now, you are inefficient, incompetent, and a waste of everyone's time and money. There are much better companies out there, too bad people are generally clueless and can not be bother with change.

I want a sailboat

noreply@blogger.com (MoneyFwd) — Fri, 06 Apr 2007 12:40:00 +0000

I've wanted a sailboat for so long, but I of course want one that is way too expensive at this time. But it is something my wife and I are working towards, even though they're money holes. I don't want to have to deal with renting a boat, or having to return it on time, or anything like that. Even if it's more expensive and more work, having the freedom to go sailing whenever I want would be great.

Since we like to sail, I've looked at several companies online that have private sailing charters. I've found one in Maine which looks really nice, although Maine can be cold. For an alternative, there are private sailing charters all over the place, Hawaii, Caribbean, etc. This one I found is from the U.S. Virgin Islands, St. Thomas Sailing Charter. They offer day cruises, you can go for a whole vacation, everything. It's like being on a luxury RV, but in the water where you don't have to go where the road takes you and you can explore a lot of different areas that you could never get to any other way. They also have dinner cruises, which is probably the only cruise we could afford. Full gourmet dinner, drinking, sailing at sunset. It sounds pretty awesome to me. Someday if we could afford it, I think it would be a great vacation, at least until I decide to get my own boat.

Update on stock games

noreply@blogger.com (MoneyFwd) — Fri, 06 Apr 2007 12:33:00 +0000

As I've mentioned I'm playing two stock games online at the moment. One I've done decent in, and the other I got screwed by the system, so I've given up.

First, CNBC's Million Dollar Challenge, as of what is says now:
Value: $1,199,441.27
Rank: 17799
Percentile: top 4%

Best I've been is top 3%. I don't plan on winning this, I just don't have the knowledge or the time to sift through stocks to find the ones that will jump 20% at a time. The top people have over $2,000,000 which is a lot more than I can make I think. But considering my place, I've done fairly well.

For eFIPO's Stock Game, I've given up. I owned a stock that was giving a $15 dividend, and although the program says that they count dividends, it never went through. after the dividend, of course the stock lost $15, (and then went up like $3), but at that point I was down almost 60%. I can't get that back without a lot of work and since the system obviously doesn't work correctly, I'm not going to waste my time.

Update

noreply@blogger.com (MoneyFwd) — Thu, 05 Apr 2007 18:46:00 +0000

I've been losing track of time lately do to the amount of work I've had to do at school and at my job. But this will catch me up a bit.

Last month was nothing exciting in the net worth area. It went up, but I know it's not going to stay that way. Most of the money in savings is for tuition, and since my wife and I decided that we need to live a bit more, some of that will be used for traveling as well. So, by June, our net worth will plummet, but it is expected and not that big of a deal. Hopefully my wife will start hearing about interviews soon and then we will be better able to cope with the ups and downs and actually grow our net worth. So overall, our net worth increased by 19.53%, or by a less exciting number, $809. Some of that had to do with extra money into my retirement from my company for profit sharing.

In the more interesting arena, the losses from last months crazy stock swings have evened out a bit. I'm still not as high as I once was, but my stocks are doing decent at the moment. Only two are in the negatives, and not by much. The two ETFs are up about 5% (as of today), and two other stocks are up over 9% and 38%. Not too shabby. The amount of money I've made is still down a little bit, although I'm not sure how this is true, but the numbers are correct so who knows. Overall my experiment numbers look like this:

Hopefully next month will see some good increases in the experiment.

More moving talk

noreply@blogger.com (MoneyFwd) — Sat, 31 Mar 2007 13:53:00 +0000

My wife and I have continued our discussion on whether or not we should move. A lot of this will depend on where she gets her new job, so we can't decide exactly the location yet. I just know that I don't want to live too far from some sort of center or retail. I like being able to walk to places.

Searching for apartments and condos in Boston is a huge pain. There are so many places, and a lot of them just aren't that nice. Of course, the location is key also. Do I want to be in an up and coming area, or an already proven area? Important questions. One place that could be considered is South Boston. The place has changed a lot over the last decade and it is going to continue to change as they keep developing. Since it's Boston, we would need to look for a realtor to find South Boston real estate. We could look in the surrounding area and it seems like Seaport Realty has a good hold of the area, knowing what is available and what the best places are. Finding an apartment generally isn't easy, finding a condo or something is a lot harder. Some of the places on the Seaport Realty site are really nice. Maybe too expensive, but with real estate the way it is lately, there's always room to negotiate. Worth thinking about.

Gambling

noreply@blogger.com (MoneyFwd) — Thu, 29 Mar 2007 22:30:00 +0000

I thought I was finally getting over my urge to gamble until a few days ago. I know that I will not win if I gamble, but I can't help to think that I could. It's an odd thing. The closest casino is a couple of hours away, so it's not like I would go just for fun by myself. Actually I would probably never go to a casino by myself. Although I play very individual games, I like to have others there. Maybe I could learn craps, I don't know. It seems fun, but I just have no idea how to play. I've tried to read some things, but still don't know. I think my game is roulette. No doubt about it. I guess I will go at some point, I just don't know when. So for now I'll play roulette online, get my fix, and then be done with it without going poor.

Someone hit my car, what would you do?

noreply@blogger.com (MoneyFwd) — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 12:47:00 +0000

The parking lot I park in at work is a long, narrow area with parking spaces on both sides. Sometimes it takes more than a three point turn to get out of a spot. Since the snow last week, the lot has been more narrow and so parking has been more of a pain, and so I've been backing up into a spot everyday so it's easier to get out. Yesterday I left one space next to me and someone else decided to back up there car into the spot, and into my car. There wasn't too much damage, just a dent near the front wheel well, and some scrapes on the side. The person was at least nice enough to leave a note and a phone number to call her.

My car is pretty old (not as old as the one in the above picture, which is not my car, source: http://www.whnet.com/4x4/), and so it really isn't worth it to spend the money and time fixing it up. The frame and everything else is fine, it's just another dent. But I couldn't let it just slide by either. So I called the number, and set a price and the person agreed to pay. It's easier that way. I probably could have gotten more, but the person left their number and you have to respect that a bit, and I don't feel like dealing with mechanics or anyone else.

Should I have asked for more or gone to a mechanic? I don't know.

Thoughts on moving

noreply@blogger.com (MoneyFwd) — Thu, 22 Mar 2007 20:04:00 +0000

My wife and I have realized that we are not going to own a house for a long time. To get a decent house in a decent area will require a 20% down payment of somewhere around $80k. That is a lot of money. But we also don't know how long we can live in our current apartment. The ceiling is paper thin (noise-wise) and so we hear everything from our noisy neighbors upstairs. Unfortunately we only moved 6 months ago, and moving again seems like a bad idea. Moving is very stressful, frustrating, and costly.

I came upon this website that connects you with a moving company that will work for you. They look deeply into the companies that match you with and make sure they're going to be worth your time and money. That would be a huge help since finding a reputable company can take a long time, and even then you could be getting ripped off. Even worse is moving across the country or into a new state, since the movers have your belongings for a longer time, and who knows what happens to your things during the weeks that they are out of your eyesight. To find Long Distance Moving Companies, this site can help you figure out what will work best for you.

Who knows when we'll actually move, but I don't think my brothers will be all that happy to help us out again so soon. They will, but they still won't care for it. I'm thinking a moving company may be the way to go. Who knows what would actually cost less money-wise and family-wise. The less I have to think about it, the better.

The market

noreply@blogger.com (MoneyFwd) — Thu, 22 Mar 2007 12:50:00 +0000

I love when stocks go up, well mostly my own, espec ially after the slump we just had. Some stocks I've owned for a little longer also have started to do well. I bought this one stock in November and it was going up and down and not really anywhere until about 2 weeks ago, and since has shot up 20%. Too bad I didn't have it in either of my stock games. So now my poor Sharebuilder account has actually done something. As I said ages ago, I messed up with my Sharebuilder account and paid too much for one stock. I put in a total of $200, got the $50 promotional money, used that for stocks and was under $200 in my account for a while. Pretty sad. Right now though, it's up to $258. Hopefully it will steadily continue that motion.

As for my stock games...
The CNBC game, my portfolio went up a bit, although I lost ground to others yesterday. I finally decided to sell some of my ok performing stocks and try to go with risky stocks that can potentially earn me more faster. Not so sure that's going to work with the stocks I picked, but I've tried. That portfolio now looks like this:
Rank: 26481 (Top 7%)
Total Return: 10.41%
Value: $1,104,131.22

My Virtual Stock Game:
I was down by a lot, something like 14+%, but I've made up a lot of ground since then. I now am in 26th place (out of 28) and my return so far is -0.27%, a lot better tha -14%. So that is looking up for a bit.

Paid blogging

noreply@blogger.com (MoneyFwd) — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 23:36:00 +0000

There's been a lot of talk about what is ok and isn't for getting paid to write blog posts. Personally, I don't see a problem with it at all. Blogging is about writing your opinions and thoughts, and if they are led in some direction by someone that's willing to pay, what's the problem? As long as you are still honest and straight forward, it's still your own opinion. Writing your opinion on something and getting paid for it is just like writing your opinion on something and not getting paid. I don't mind getting paid, so I'll probably do it all because it can't hurt. It doesn't make my opinions any less.

Buy precious metals?

noreply@blogger.com (MoneyFwd) — Thu, 15 Mar 2007 21:28:00 +0000

I thought about this a few years ago when I saw an article about a guy that made millions of dollars through spamming, and then bought millions worth of gold bullion. He then supposedly buried it somewhere in the woods and no one can find it.

Anyway, during my thoughts on the crazy things that could possibly happen to our world, I've thought about buy metal. I figure if our money ends up being worthless, at least gold and silver will still be worth something. It could be thought of as being a backup of your money if the stock market crashes and/or your cash becomes worthless. But I of course don't have that much money that it matters. But I think I would still like to buy gold bullion one day. At least to have it because I think it would be cool to say "I have some gold bars in the safe." or something like that.

But, I figured finding this stuff to buy would be hard. But then I found this site that sells gold bullion and silver coins and the such. Imagine having some of those sitting around. Or you can buy it through this company and have it one of their vaults for safe keeping. Not as cool as keeping it around the house, but cool to know you have it. Eventually I'll invest in this stuff, but who knows when.

(This was a paid post, although my opinions still are the same.. I want a stack of gold and silver in a vault underneath my house.. that'd be awesome.)

Business thought

noreply@blogger.com (MoneyFwd) — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 15:12:00 +0000

I've been toying with the idea of opening an online business using a drop shipper. I haven't found out too much information, but it seems like it could be doable. I need to find out more though, and I'm not exactly sure where to look. It's tough because I don't want it as a full-time job at all, just something to make extra money. So I'm not sure if it could even work.

Ideas?

Happenings online

noreply@blogger.com (MoneyFwd) — Tue, 13 Mar 2007 12:54:00 +0000

There are a few stock market games I'm part of right now online, the CNBC Million Dollar Challenge, and eFipo's Stock Market Game. Join if you'd like, although the CNBC is full of angry people at the moment because of some cheaters. You can read a little about that at It's Just Money.

My stats at this moment are:
CNBC - Rank: 20353 (Top 8%)
Total Return: 5.54%
Portfolio: $1,055,428.36

eFipo's Stock Game:
Rank: 28 (...of 28)
Total Return: -4.74% (Although week's return is marked at 11.29%!)
Portfolio: $952,651.25
I made a mistake on this one and tried out something that quickly lost me $40,000 or so. I've been trying to get back since.

A bit behind... updates

noreply@blogger.com (MoneyFwd) — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 13:07:00 +0000

I haven't posted in a while, but I'll catch up eventually.

Anyway, I did my networth and I'm up by a chunk now. The big increase was from our tax return. Of course, ideally we should be getting little back from the IRS, but for several reasons we did not do that. First, my wife claimed 0 exemptions since she was working on and off while in school and so that was the best way to make sure we didn't pay too little. I have 1 exemption because we need the money to survive. But, we also got the lifetime learning credit and the tuition deduction which is what really boosted up our return. Since my wife will not have a full-time steady job until september, we're just going to keep going on this path for now. The return was nice anyway because it came at a great time and now I know my tuition will be set through the end of the year.

The money experiment, as I said before, is a learning experience. This was from February 28th after close of the stock market:

This was before the bigger crash which I went about 3% down. It's back in the positive now. So I've done ok so far. I was up about 12% at one point and I should have maybe thought about making a move, but I didn't. Of course, this is only the first month, so I have a more time to let this grow, and I believe it will.

I've also started to look for alternative incomes. We just don't make enough to really do all that we want to do, and so it makes sense to see what's out there. So far I've done a lot of surveys and I'm still waiting for the cash to be credited. I've done some stuff on CashDuck as well. I'm not sure how long I can stick with all of these since it really depends on how much free time I have... and right now I don't have a lot. But we can use all we can get.

Are unions robbing us?

noreply@blogger.com (MoneyFwd) — Thu, 22 Feb 2007 19:21:00 +0000

It is well known that unions in Massachusetts have a lot power. Many government officials will back off on plans that unions strongly oppose because of their power. Unfortunately this has lead to a lot of problems, especially financially. (This is related to personal finance, you'll see later on. Also unions can be good things, it just depends.)

In Massachusetts, by law (with the backing of police unions), there has to be a police detail at most construction/repair sites. The other 49 states have civilian flag persons. So if a company is working in a manhole, there must be a police officer. If there is work being done on the highway, there must be a police officer. My parents who live in a small neighborhood on a street that loops onto itself and is not a throughway, once had a police officer in front of their house when a telephone (or some other utility) company was doing work in a manhole. WASTE OF MONEY AND TIME. Most of the time the officers just sit there chatting with the workers, not actually directing traffic or doing anything useful (This is what I've experienced while trying to get around workers by going into on-coming traffic because the officer is too busy chatting to direct traffic.. which is his/her job).

Sure, the company that is doing the work pays for the police detail, and the public money does not directly pay for the detail work right away. But using these police details requires other officers to be taking up the missing work that the individual is missing. Even if it is overtime, the fatigue that must happen from working so much overtime must affect work performance. On top of this, the retirement pension that these officers make looks at their TOTAL salary (usually the last 3 years before retirement), to come up with an average (or percentage of) to calculate the pension. That means if an officer made an extra $40,000 a year in detail work for the past 3 years, that is included in the calculation. So whatever percentage of that they get every month for their pension, we as tax payers have to pay for it, for the rest of their lives.

Think about how much money that is if 5 officers a year retire and live for 30 more years. That money adds up to a lot. And it makes matters worse since our local governments are already adding on more fees and taxes to make up for their budget shortfalls. It may not seem like you are paying for this, but you are. The biggest source of income for local government is property taxes, and everyone pays those. If you rent, it's part of your rent that the landlord uses to pay the property taxes, it's obvious if you own, and money even comes from other taxes (in Massachusetts we have excise tax on cars and boats). Your fees for parking permits and other fees go towards what the government needs to pay. You are paying for these services.

As an example, the MA State Police average salary is between about $49,000 to $68,000. More than 1,000 police officers (out of 2,338) made over $100,000 last year. In Boston, about 41% (1,276) of the police made over $100,000 last year. 25 of them made over $200,000. All the while there were 74 homicides, one less than in 2005 which was at a 10-year high. As of January 1st, according to Boston.com, only 28 of those homicides have been solved. What have the police been doing? (All data taken from Boston.com)

Any mention of changing the way of calculating pensions or taking away police details will be destroyed by union opposition. So for now we're stuck with this system and we will continue to see our money being squandered. How there is not an outcry about this, I have no idea.

$100 gift card from the Citi Diamond AmEx card

noreply@blogger.com (MoneyFwd) — Thu, 22 Feb 2007 18:04:00 +0000

Finally after 2 months of waiting I received my 10,000 bonus points. The free points were one reason I applied for the card in the first place. They first only credited me 5,000 points. I called and asked and it had something to do with an error. Eventually they worked it out. Took a little too long though.

Anyway, I used the points to get a $100 gift card to Target since we do plenty of our shopping there. As I've stated before, I may take $100 and put it into my HSBC account that holds my "not my money", since it is free money and I would be going to Target anyway to spend money. I haven't decided whether or not I'm going to do this yet.

Can you job count as charity?

noreply@blogger.com (MoneyFwd) — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 20:20:00 +0000

There is a lot of talk about giving to charities and how much we should give. A lot of times, giving can be pretty meaningless. We write a check and it's done with. I'm sure a lot of this money goes to wonderful things, but what about people who live their lives helping others? What about the people that take a huge pay cut to work for a cause they feel strongly about? Does this count as charity?

I was thinking about this since every few months I have the urge to go to law school. The problem is that the type of law I would want to do (environmental) generally does not pay well, and having a $100k+ debt with a low paying jobs just isn't appealing. Some people do this though. So if a lawyer who could be making $90k a year (after taxes let's say), actually works at a non-profit and makes $40k a year, do they really make a $50k a year donation to charity? If a doctor who could make $100k a year works in a clinic and makes only $45k a year, does that doctor make a $55k a year donation?

In my opinion, they do. They may not be contributing money, but a non-profit or other organization can not survive without staff members. Someone needs to do the work. Maybe it's their job, but is a job always considered non-charity because you get paid for it? I think that's unfair to those workers.

Of course the doctor and lawyer can not take a $50k or $55k deduction on their taxes or anything, but does that make them worse than the people who make a deduction every year and get to deduct that from their taxes?

I think a lot of professionals get the short end of the stick, and we rarely, if ever, find the time to really think where our world would be without them.

Lessons learned on the stock market

noreply@blogger.com (MoneyFwd) — Thu, 15 Feb 2007 21:15:00 +0000

As I mentioned in my post about my money game, I put $5000 into a brokerage account and bought stocks. So far I've learned some lessons, although I'm not sure how good they are.

If you buy a stock and you believe in it, be patient. You can't let a dropping price change your mind, and if it seems high, it doesn't mean it is. Do your research and stick by your picks, unless you have reason to change your mind. I bought one stock at a higher price than I should have, and felt bad that I did this as it dropped several percentage points. Right now it is up over 28% since I bought it on January 31st. I was not patient with another stock. I thought it was trading too high and I bought it too high, so I sold it thinking it would drop and I could get it cheaper. Since then, the lowest price has been my payment price, and right now it is up about $0.46 cents a share (or 8.3%) from the price I originally paid and sold it for. I should have just kept it. Oh well, it was my own mistake.