A Blog About My Life’s Lessons

A while back I read an article on money.cnn.com about FREE online tools for tracking personal finances and tracking network. The article identified the following websites as good and secure locations to track your finances.

Yodlee MoneyCenter
Mint.com
Geezeo
Wesabe

Taking a step back, in the past I’ve used Microsoft Money to track my personal finances.  However, I just never liked […]

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I purchased a few shares of Qualcomm stock on Friday at the opening bell for $45.  I bought it for a number of reason, which I will explain later.  First, I want to share with you the good timing.  The QCOM stock just happened to get upgraded that same morning by Oppenheimer & Co. analyst […]

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I’ve been flying around the world the last few weeks, so I’m just now getting a chance to finally write a blog post.  Last week during my travels I was reminded of a need to increase my emergency fund because crazy and unexpected things can and do happen. 
I was chatting with a co-worker during my latest […]

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I’ve been remodeling my 1/2 bath the last few weeks (I plan on blogging about it later).  A remodeled bathroom wouldn’t be complete without a new toilet.  New toilets can range range can range from $100-$400.  The frugal person that I am, I’m always looking for a handout :-).  Well, in Austin Texas, we have […]

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I read this article on yahoo.com that talked about gas prices rising to $4 a gallon in some places by summer. The rising gas to date really haven’t effected our plan budgeted activities because YTD its only gone up ~6-10%.  Over the weekend, I saw prices at $3.12/gallon here in Austin.  However, if prices continue […]

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My employer, National Instruments, has just recently given employees the option of contributing to both a regular 401k and a Roth 401k.  To be honest, this is new territory for me and I haven’t done enough research into what is best for me. So, I’ve been dragging my feet a little and have not started taking advantage of the Roth 401k.  
Today, I ran […]

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 Some people prefer getting a nice tax return from the IRS, but I prefer  not to give the IRS an interest free loan.  Hence, over the last few years I’ve tried to calculate my monthly IRS withholdings so that I get <$100 back come April 14th.  For example, I currently claim 8 allowances, which is a […]

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Last night, my wife and I celebrated our 4th anniversary with a night out on the town.  Without going into too many details, it was awesome!  You can learn more about the details from my last blog entry. I plan to blog my review about Ester’s Follies at a later time (in short it was incredible).  Today, I […]

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The hot topic these days is the tax rebates from the US government.  From what I can tell, it is officially going to happen (pending signatures early next week).  While I was doing my research to figure out how much I was going to get, I came across this article on cnn.com.  This article answered […]

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Budgeting is a hot topic for me right now, and nothing makes budgeting harder than non-fixed costs (utilities, gas, food, etc…).  Its always a pain in December when my Gas bill spikes 2 or 3 times its normal rate.  I recently discovered  a way to make my utilities become fixed cost (both Gas and Electric) through a levelized program […]

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