The week in review

Posted on September 27, 2009 by Mike

I’ve been pretty busy this week so I haven’t made any posts. But I wanted to give a quick update on a few things going on, so I will just touch on them all quickly.

I took some photos for an upcoming article. I think people will enjoy this one.
Thanks to the advice from livingoffdividends.com, I bought some NLY stock the day before it announced it was increasing its dividend.
I survived my two midterms in my first semester in business school, getting an A and a B.
I started making the purchases for my father’s high dividend portfolio, but I will provide more details on that later.

And that’s about it. I have a bunch of homework to get done today, so I am going to get back to that now. Peace!

Mint.com – A review of the investments section

Posted on September 19, 2009 by Mike

I’ve been a big fan of Mint.com ever since I first heard of it. They’ve been in the news lately since they’ve announced that they are being purchased by Intuit for $170 million dollars. While many people have congratulated them on creating a great product and now reap the financial benefits of it. Others have thought it would have been better for them to continue independently and continue to drive innovation in their product. Regardless of how you feel about their corporate situation, very few people are critical of the product that Mint has put together since they started up.

In the short amount of time since they launched, they’ve added a lot of features that customers have asked for on their forums, one of which being investment tracking. For obvious reasons, this was something I really wanted to see them add, but when they did I was somewhat underwhelmed. And now that I have re-visited the tool, I think I know why. One of the things that makes Mint so great is its vast amount of data that they have. And when the investment tracking first launched, they have very little data. Fast forward a year, and they now have much more of both my data, and everyone else’s (anonymous) data.
Continue reading →

Weekend tip: See hidden files in Finder in Snow Leopard

Posted on September 18, 2009 by Mike

Read all about it here: Finer Things in Mac

In Snow Leopard (OS X 10.6+), if you need to open a hidden file, all you need to do is type Cmd-Shift-. (that’s a period) in the standard Open File dialog. All hidden files will be displayed.
This is a toggle, so typing the shortcut a second time will hide the hidden files again.

This site is all about finding the somewhat subtle things about OS X that make it great. If you haven’t gotten snow leopard yet, what are you waiting for?

What I’m reading: Caro’s Book of Poker Tells

Posted on September 14, 2009 by Mike

For this week’s installment of What I’m reading, I bring you a book that I first read about 7 years ago. When I first decided that I wanted to play poker seriously, I bought two books. The first was Super System by Doyle Brunson, and the other was this one. While most poker players will tell you that Super System is the ultimate poker book, and they are probably right, I think that Caro’s book has some interesting life lessons intertwined in its pages that are so heavily poker focused.
Continue reading →

New Portfolio: Dividends to beat the bank

Posted on September 13, 2009 by Mike

In talking to my father the other day, he mentioned he had a large CD that was about to mature, and wanted to build a portfolio of stocks to beat the interest rate he was getting. There are two nice things about this portfolio.

We get to start from scratch with a clean slate and pick whatever stocks we want to.
We have a clear goal to work towards. (Beat 4% interest)

Continue reading →

Do the minimum when it comes to retirement

Posted on September 11, 2009 by Mike

I hope that most people reading this already have retirement accounts setup, since that would mean I don’t have to worry about my friends and readers becoming old and poor and unable to support themselves. But seriously, there are a few things that people can do to make sure they are doing all of the right things for their retirement accounts. This article is going to cover all of the things you should do if you haven’t already, and can also act as a checklist when you start a new job and want to get everything setup with your new paycheck. While I’ve been doing this for close to a decade, in the mean time a site has popped up that documents this process fairly well, so if you want to see a nice diagram and watch a youtube video explaining it, check out IWillTeachYouToBeRich.com.

In this article we’ll walk through the setup of:

401(k)
(Roth) IRA