Tag Archives: Finance

New for 2010 – Rollover to Roth IRA conversions

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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 →

Will that be credit or debit?

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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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The week in review

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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!

Do the minimum when it comes to retirement

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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

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How could I have forgotten Ford?

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I was reminded this morning, that when I went thru last week’s update on my stock holdings, that I left out one of the purchases that I had the most confidence in working out over the long run. Ford! I bought shares of Ford back on June 11th for a little bit under $6 dollars a share, and after a a nice earnings call this morning, they were up to almost $7. My horizon on this stock is much longer term, as I am hoping that they take this auto industry crisis as a turning stone in their business, and continue upwards to profitability, but the news is so far so good.

While I’m posting I might as well add some more info based on this quarter’s earnings reports so far. Continue reading →

My current financial holdings

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I’m not obligated by the SEC to declare what my holdings are, but I do enjoy doing it from time to time, just to track publicly how I am doing. I freely admit my losers when I have them, and try and state my winners ahead of time, so that I am on the record in favor of a stock BEFORE it runs up. It’s been a while since I’ve posted about stocks at all so I’ll just jump right in.