I received an e-mail from my employer’s HR department this week announcing some changes to our 401(k) plan. Here’s what they said (emphasis added by me, fund names masked). The 401(k) Committee decided to remove the ABC Fund from the Plan due to poor performance for several quarters. The committee closely monitors all funds in […]
Latest Blog Posts
Successful Business Strategy: Selling Hope
While reading newspapers on a plane, I discovered a winning business strategy: Selling Hope. The products you sell don’t have to work as advertised. They may or may not. That’s not the point. All you have to do is selling the hope that they will work. There are plenty of examples for this strategy. Airborne […]
Tax and Inflation Penalize Savers
I bought some EE savings bonds in May 2002. Today is the first day I get to redeem them without penalty. Each $100 saved back then is now worth $118.40. This is one of my worst investments in the last five years. My return on these EE savings bonds is 3.44% a year over the […]
Vanguard or T. Rowe Price Funds: Actively Managed vs. Index Funds
Blogger pf at My Personal Finance Odyssey reviewed his investments in T. Rowe Price funds. He gathered last 5 years’ performance numbers for the T. Rowe Price funds he invested in and the performance numbers for similar funds by Vanguard. His analysis showed that many T. Rowe Price funds had better returns than the comparable […]
Opt In or Opt Out: The Power of the Default Option
I read a great article on New York Times last week, Unnatural Selections. The author, Mr. Barry Schwartz is a professor of psychology at Swarthmore College. He wrote about the power of the default option. People tend to stay with the default option presented to them because deviating from the default option requires making a […]
Which Vanguard Money Market Fund?
This post was written in 2007. Things have changed since then. Please read the update Which Vanguard Money Market Fund Is the Best at Your Tax Rates.
Who Pays for Credit Card Rewards and Rebates?
There is debate about whether one should charge everything on credit cards for reaping the rewards (cash rebate or miles) or pay everything by cash (and by debit card and checks). In this post I examine the source of the credit card rewards. If I charge everything on credit cards, pay the balance in full […]
Picking Stocks Is a Waste of Time
The 2/26/2007 issue of the Wall Street Journal had a special section for stock score board. If you don’t have access to WSJ Online, it’s worth digging it out from a library. I’m highlighting something I noticed in that section which makes the point for the title of this post — picking stocks is a […]
Bogleheads Forum Moved To Diehards.org
The new Diehards in the Vanguard forum I wrote about two weeks ago was renamed to Bogleheads forum. It moved to the diehards.org domain, which has been the more popular entry point for the old Morningstar forum. Diehards.org is the #1 spot on Google when you search for “Vanguard Diehards.” They changed the forum’s name […]
Prosper Lending Return on Investment Analysis
IndexFundFan alerted me to an excellent review for person-to-person lending on Prosper.com by Jonathan at My Money Blog: part 1, part 2. I wrote about Prosper in a previous post Prosper.com Or Junk Bond Fund?, in which I said if people want to take credit risks, there are other places to take them, such as […]