FT vs WSJ: Which is Better?
My Wall Street Journal subscription expired in July, but they are still sending me the paper. Maybe they wish I would renew, but I already started a subscription to Financial Times. Having both papers at the same time gives me an opportunity to put them side by side for a comparison.
Both Financial Times (FT) and Wall Street Journal (WSJ) cover business news. I like FT better. Let me explain why using last Friday’s papers as an example.
Fewer pages. Friday’s FT had 22 pages in two sections; WSJ had 46 pages in four sections. FT had one full ad page and two pages of market data; WSJ had six full ad pages and four pages of market data and legal notice. FT is more concentrated, with less fluff. 22 pages are plenty to go through already.
Book Review: No One Would Listen
Being a financial blogger, I often receive requests for reviewing books. I usually ignore them but when I was offered No One Would Listen by Harry Markopolos, I took the offer because I’m fascinated by the story.
Harry Markopolos is the guy who sounded the alarm on Bernie Madoff’s giant Ponzi scheme. He submitted detailed evidence to the SEC several times over ten years, only to be ignored and deemed "not credible." After SEC finally conducted an investigation, they only asked Madoff to file some papers and register as an investment advisor. Madoff became more legit than he was ever before. He was able to claim he was examined and cleared by the SEC.
The most astonishing part of the story is that Madoff didn’t execute any trades in all those years. If only the SEC asked for trade tickets and double checked with the parties on the other side of the trade, the whole scheme could’ve been revealed very easily. SEC’s failure is bureaucracy and incompetence of the epic proportion.
The Best Tax Book
I can tell it’s tax time. Most of the questions posted to my old posts are about taxes. I’m not a CPA; I write about taxes only to the extent they affect me.
The best way to get tax questions answered is of course asking a real CPA. I realize not everybody can afford a real CPA so they ask an amateur on the Internet. The next best way to get tax questions answered would be getting a tax book.
There are two popular tax book series. J.K. Lasser’s Your Income Tax and Ernst and Young Tax Guide. These books are updated every year. They are very inexpensive for their size (think yellow pages). They both go for $13.57 at this moment on Amazon.
Overhyped: The Smartest 401k Book You’ll Ever Read
I wasn’t so impressed by Dan Solin’s previous book, but I was willing to take a second chance on his The Smartest 401k Book You’ll Ever Read because it got endorsements from John Bogle, founder of Vanguard, William Bernstein, whose books I like, and Taylor Larimore, a co-editor of The Bogleheads’ Guide to Retirement Planning, to which I contributed a chapter.
I don’t know what’s wrong about publishing these days. Or maybe it’s always been this way. It seems you have to make an outlandish claim in order to grab people’s attention. The book isn’t necessarily bad but it’s way overhyped. The back cover has these in large bold colored font:
Everyone is telling you it’s a “no-brainer” to invest in a 401(k) or 403(b) plan because of the employer match.
Book Review: The Bogleheads’ Guide to Retirement Planning
I’ve been waiting for this book for a long time. About this time last year, the leaders of the Bogleheads investment forum announced a book project and asked for volunteers. I was selected and assigned to write a chapter on defined benefit pension plans. The book was finally published in September and I got my free book from the publisher last week. This is the first time I got the chance to read the whole book.
The title is The Bogleheads’ Guide to Retirement Planning. It covers a wide range of topics on planning for retirement. The emphasis is on planning, not saving or investing for retirement, although there are still a few chapters on investing. It starts off with the planning process. Then it goes over the different savings and investment vehicles, investment strategies, how to make the most of social security, withdrawal strategies once you are retired, insurance, estate planning, how to find help if you need it and what to do if you face divorce or too much debt you can’t repay.
I like the broad approach in this book. Retirement planning is a complex subject. There can be full-scale books on each of the topics covered in this book. Every chapter covers the main points in about 15 pages so the size of the book stays manageable. If the reader wants to read more about a particular subject, there are a list of additional resources at the end of each chapter. The book serves as a good roadmap for retirement planning.
Investing Is Simple
I haven’t written much about investing lately, because investing is simple and I think I pretty much covered everything already. You come up with an asset allocation, open some accounts, pick a few index funds, and you are done. Once in a while you see if anything is out of whack and you redirect your new money to wherever is lagging. It’s not complicated at all.
Fellow blogger Mike Piper apparently agrees. He wrote a small book called Investing Made Simple. He’s making the PDF available as a free download until October 1. [Free PDF download is no longer available.]
Table of Contents » Read more …
Download Price Quotes to Microsoft Money After Microsoft Pulls the Plug
There is a small piece of unfinished business in my series for replacing Microsoft Money. After giving my requirements and looking at Quicken, GnuCash, and Moneydance, I came upon two OFX scripts for downloading transactions directly from the financial institutions, outside of Microsoft Money.
Those scripts will take care of the transactions. They will also update the prices for the securities held in the investment accounts that provide transaction download. However, if you have holdings in accounts that do not provide transaction download, the prices for those holdings are still not updated.
With the help of a book from the library, Learning Python, and a lot of Googling, I came up with a new script that gets the quotes from Yahoo! and writes a dummy OFX file for importing into Microsoft Money. Being a Python newbie, I’m sure the script can be made much more elegant, but what I have now works.
Mixing Money With Family and Friends
I picked up this book because of the title and the cartoon on the cover. Isn’t It Their Turn to Pick Up the Check is written by a couple Jeanne Fleming and Leonard Schwarz who answer money and ethics questions in their column Do The Right Thing in Money Magazine and on CNNMoney.com.
This little book is all about the messy money dealings between family members and friends: lending and borrowing, gifts, inheritance, sharing expenses, disparity in income and spending priorities, keeping and breaking promises, and so on.
It takes a Q&A format. Every chapter is about one particular topic, with maybe 10 questions and answers in “Dear Abby” style. The answers are both serious and with a touch of humor. I enjoyed them and I learned a lot about human nature.
Replacing Microsoft Money, Part 5: OFX Scripts
This is part 5 in my series for replacing Microsoft Money. I gave my requirements in part 1. Then I looked at Quicken, GnuCash, and Moneydance.
I still haven’t found a perfect replacement for Microsoft Money. Money isn’t perfect either, but it’s working. Well, sort of. I already know the bugs and limitations and I know how to work around them.
Having suffered from being at the mercy of one software vendor, I really don’t look forward to jumping into the arms of another vendor with the same policy of automatically disabling features. Meanwhile, the contenders GnuCash and Moneydance still don’t match all the functionalities I’d like to have.
Replacing Microsoft Money, Part 4: Moneydance
[Update on Sept. 5, 2009] After evaluating the alternatives, I discovered a way to automatically download the transactions and price quotes and feed them to Money after Microsoft pulls the plug. See follow-up posts Replacing Microsoft Money, Part 5: OFX Scripts and Download Price Quotes to Microsoft Money After Microsoft Pulls the Plug.
This is part 4 in my series for replacing Microsoft Money. I gave my requirements in part 1. I looked at Quicken and GnuCash in parts 2 and 3. This time I’m looking at Moneydance.
Moneydance is a Java application that runs on Linux, Mac, and Windows. Unlike GnuCash, MoneyDance is not free. It’s made by a small company called The Infinite Kind. As far as I can tell, the application is primarily developed by one developer Sean Reilly. A Moneydance license costs $40. There is a trial version that limits to 100 transactions. I tested Moneydance 2008r4 on Windows.
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The Bogleheads' Guide to Retirement Planning by Taylor Larimore, Mel Lindauer, Richard Ferri, and Laura F. Dogu
