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From the New York Times:

Diageo said Thursday it would transfer ownership of £430 million, or $645 million, worth of whiskey to a pension funding partnership. Diageo employees would not receive their pensions in whiskey rather than cash, but the move does give them a guarantee that they would not walk away empty-handed should the company default.

I like the idea. U.S. Automakers might have been able to do this with their pensions. Give the pension fund a few Corvettes to sell instead of going bankrupt?

So now that March is here, I wanted to give an update on my new “portfolio”, which is really more of a savings vehicle than a portfolio when you think about it. By using my debit card instead of my airline rewards card, I “saved” $9.32 in February via Keep the Change transfers in my Bank of America account. I rounded this up to $10 and initiated a transfer to my Lending Club account this morning. This money will be invested in a new loan note as soon as I have $25 in cash available.

Now to the even better news. Based on my first month of investing at Lending Club, I am currently earning a Net Annualized Return of 13.74%!

All ten of my notes are issued and current, and I have roughly $9 in cash in the account. Combined with next month’s payments and March’s transfers from Keep the Change, I should be able to invest in a new note next month.

This graph makes me feel pretty good about how things are going so far:

As long as I continue to stay on the right side of this distribution I will be satisfied, and continue to invest more and more money into the Lending Club system.

See my original review of Lending Club here.

This may not be of value to very many, but for those few it may be VERY valuable. For those with a “traditional” IRA or a “rollover” IRA, you may be one of the people that it’s VERY valuable for. As we’ve covered before in our “Do the minimum” retirement post, there is one major difference between a traditional (or rollover) IRA and a Roth IRA. With a traditional, the earnings of the money in the account are tax deferred. With a Roth IRA, they are tax free. This is a large advantage of the Roth for those that will have large amounts of appreciation in their IRA accounts. The traditional IRA does have something in its favor however, and that is it reduces your taxable income for the current year. For example, if you make $50,000 and contribute $5,000 to your traditional IRA, you will pay taxes on $45,000. Continue Reading

Most of us are used to hearing this question whenever we pull out the plastic from our wallets. Over the past few years, I have flip flopped on my answer to this question depending on my current situation. And now, that I have worked myself out of debt, I think the situation may be even more complex. Let’s go over the history of things to see how we got into this situation.
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Here is the first post since joining Project 52.
I recently signed up at the web site Lending Club after considering doing so for a while.  A friend of mine had signed up for it and it looked intriguing.  It’s nothing new for sure, a quick search into their crunchbase profile tells us they got started in May 2007 as a Facebook application to promote peer-to-peer lending.  In a nutshell, it means if you need $100 and I have $100 to loan out, they put us together.  You don’t need to go to a bank for a loan, and I can get more interest on my money than a savings account would give me.
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It took a long time, but over the past few years, more like almost a decade, I have been working to get out of credit card debt and never return.  The day has finally come.  No balances.  The only debt I have now is my mortgage and my car.  So my next goal is to pay off the car.

Debt Free Youth