J.C.’s Money Blog

Oil prices are running at nearly $100 a barrel, which means gas prices are high as well. Besides working on increasing fuel efficiency and cutting back on driving, there is another solution to make gas prices less painful: hedge them.
By finding an investment that increases as oil or gas prices increase, you can eliminate the […]

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My goals for 2008 are fairly simple:

Don’t lose money
Track all spending

Since I don’t know if I’ll have much of an income next year after I quit my job, its likely I won’t be able to save much, but I don’t want to start moving in the wrong direction, so my fist goal for […]

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In order to achieve financial freedom, you have to generate enough wealth to live off the interest. That is, your capital base has to be big enough, that you can allocate enough money into low risk assets that pay you back. The amount that they pay you back must be large enough to meet your […]

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Hello faithful blog readers, I haven’t posted anything in a while, and I won’t be posting much over the next few days, because I’m moving to another country next week, which is taking up quite a bit of my free time.
Two things I’ve noticed since starting this blog roughly a month ago are:

It is more […]

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One beautiful thing about money is that it generally represents the effect of a win-win transaction. I think most people view money as a fight between the haves and have-nots. The standard view is that there is a given amount of wealth available, and that wealth is simply redistributed around by money transactions. That’s not […]

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I mentioned that I love to read Robert Kiyosaki articles on Yahoo!, because I hate them so much. On the other hand, I love to read articles by Charles Wheelen articles there, because they are usually pretty good, albeit a little less sensationalist than Bob’s.
He has an article on why limiting free trade in your […]

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My portfolio is pretty boring right now, but I imagine it will get more interesting as I shift from focusing on my career to growing my assets.

Right now I have nothing but this index fund, since I have been focusing on my career, instead of focusing on my portfolio.
SPDRs is a low cost index fund […]

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MM from pfblog.com just wrote an article about why he is not a dividend investor.
His arguments are:
Share buy back possibility
Companies can buy back their own shares when they have the cash, instead of giving it out as dividends. This makes the percentage of company ownership a bit higher for every share, making the shares each […]

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Today a colleague retired after working at my company over 40 years. It was very unceremonius. The management didn’t make any kind of announcement, and they seemed pleased to have his head count out off their books. He hadn’t been planning to retire, but they offered an early retirement package, which he accepted.
He never really […]

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I noticed a few personal finance bloggers are listing the dividends that they earned over the course of 2007. Dividends fit nicely into the idea of “passive income”, where you basically build up enough assets that pay you back at certain periods, and hopefully you can accumulate enough to meet all your expenses, and voila, […]

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I started my webpages in November, and have generated:
Nov 2007: $0.43
Better luck next month I hope.

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Here’s my first net worth “update”:

Account
> Value

Checking BoA
$254.12

Checking VB
$5,715.00

Savings BoA
$300.05

Brokerage Cash
$422.15

Brokerage Equities
$8,919.60

401k - vested
$32,768.65

401k - nonvested
$9,019.33

Auto loan
$735.00

Credit Card 1
$0.00

Credit Card 2
$0.00

401k - nonvested
$9,019.33

Notes:
I have a low interest car loan that will be paid off at the end of this month. through automatic bill payment. Its an old used car, only worth about $5,000, […]

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