J.C.’s Money Blog

Ahh, the world markets are tumbling on subprime mortgage crisis fears. Excellent.
I just opened a savings account at ING Direct, and I was planning on setting up my emergency and car fund there, but I decided to send half the money to Scottrade, so I can snatch up some more shares of America’s top 500 [...]

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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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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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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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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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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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The market was up quite a bit the last two days, so for now my SPY purchase looks like impeccable market timing: +3.85% in two days. That always feels good, even though I know I can’t do it repeatedly. I am tempted to dump the shares I just bought for a quick profit. So I [...]

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Up till now, I have mostly accumulated mutual funds through my retirement account, and an index fund in my taxable trading account. I have dabbled in individual stocks with moderate success, but always thought I should focus on my career until I have enough net worth to make actively managing my portfolio worth my time.
How [...]

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