The suspense is over. The Federal Open Market Committee lowered the target federal funds rate by 0.5%, from 5.25% to 4.75%. The Board of Governors also lowered the discount rate by another 0.5% from 5.75% to 5.25%. The discount rate was already lowered by 0.50% last month. The market wanted a 0.50% cut. The Fed obliged. The full FOMC […]
Latest Blog Posts
Life Insurance: How Much Should You Buy
I ended my previous post on life insurance with the question “How much should you buy?” I will address it in this post. First you have to figure out how much income you need to replace for your beneficiaries. You don’t have to replace 100% of your gross income because if you died, you would […]
Life Insurance: What to Buy
My last post about life insurance was on how to buy life insurance. This time I’m going to talk about what to buy. Permanent versus Term The best approach on the permanent aka cash value versus term discussion is tuning out. Just buy term. Very few people have a permanent need for life insurance. The vast […]
How to Buy Life Insurance
September is Life Insurance Awareness Month. I won’t bore you with what life insurance is or why/when one needs life insurance. If you want to know, you can find plenty on the Internet. I’m just writing about how you go about buying life insurance. Let me get this out first. This is not a sponsored post. I’m not an insurance […]
Up-selling At The Doctor’s Office
If you went out to buy something and came home with something more expensive than what you originally planned, you’ve been up-sold. According to Wikepedia (link), “Up-selling is a sales technique whereby a salesman attempts to have the consumer purchase more expensive items, upgrades, or other add-ons in an attempt to make a more profitable […]
More On Missing The 10 Best Days
Blogger Nickel at fivecentnickel.com made some great comments to my post about missing the 10 best days in the stock market. I showed in my post that the probability of missing the best 10 days in 10 years is one in 2.8 billion billion billion. Nickel disagreed. Because the comments require a long response, I’m […]
How Low Can It Go?
The stock market keeps dropping. The Dow closed under 13,000 yesterday. The recent decline tripped another wire for my rebalancing. This time it was for the small cap value asset class. I bought more iShares Russell 2000 Value Index Fund (IWN). This fund was down 8% since the beginning of this year. It was down 15% from its […]
What Happens When Your Mortgage Lender Goes Out of Business
Since we had the subprime problem, many mortgage companies went bankrupt. The largest mortgage lender in the country Countrywide Financial (CFC) announced today that they drew down their entire $11.5 billion credit line. The analogy for this move in personal finance is like a person who normally uses credit cards only for convenience all of […]
Credit Card Dispute Against Priceline
This is an update to my credit card dispute against Priceline. When I went on vacation a few months ago, Priceline gave me a bad hotel. I’m usually not very picky. But this time it was bad enough for me to file a dispute with my credit card company against Priceline. It was the only […]
APR or APY, It Doesn’t Matter
It’s very strange. I see a lot of people reaching my blog when they search for information on converting APR to APY or vice-versa. They end up on my post last year Interest Rate: APY and APR which mentioned two Excel formula: EFFECT which converts APR to APY, and NOMINAL which converts APY to APR. […]