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’m happy to announce that my employee 401k has turned positive for the first time this year! I was very surprised when I saw the data (see image).

To be exact, it is now up 1.2% for year. At one point it was down over 6%.  I’ve been pretty pleased in its performance, considering the broad market was […]

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I’m not a professional stock picker, I follow it more than anything because I don’t have much money to invest in individual stock (Most of my assets are in mutual funds in my 401k). Plus, I have  a poor track record.  Usually when I buy a stock it goes down.  For example, I finally get […]

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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 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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On my quest to become successful in life and personal finance, I’m always on the lookout for ways to be more efficent with my time when looking for money saving solutions. Sometimes, it takes too much work to save trying to save a few dollars, especially when it takes an additional 30 mins to 1 hr of my time.  One […]

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