Tag Archives: Money and Business

The best way to understand this recession

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I know I just linked to Calculated Risk the other day, but over the weekend they updated one of their graphs that I think BY FAR illustrates what our current recession looks like compared to the other recessions since WWII.

Click on the image below for a full size version of the chart.  Each line represents one of the 11 recessions that have occurred since WWII.  The chart represents employment during those recessions.  The far left of the chart is the beginning of each recession, and the further down a line goes, the more jobs were lost during that recession.  The dotted line in the center shows the deepest job loss, or put simply, “the worst it got.”

You can see that this recession has suffered more job loss than any other previous recession, and by quite a large margin.  It took 2 years from the start of the current recession until hitting the bottom, but the recovery is looking a lot flatter than the descent.  We are almost 2 years past the bottom point, but nowhere near back to where we started.

For most people my age, the only other recession on this chart that they will be able to associate with is the 2001 “dot com bubble” recession.  Comparing that brown line to the red line you can see that the “dot com bubble” didn’t suffer as severe of job losses, and it was over by this time.

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 →

Mint.com – A review of the investments section

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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.
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New Portfolio: Dividends to beat the bank

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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.

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

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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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Four years later: eBay sells Skype for the same price it paid for it

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I wrote about eBay in May 2008, and talked about how the company had a lot of issues, specifically with their direction. I mentioned Skype in particular and how much they paid for it, which can also be found in their press release here. Today they announced that they are selling it, and lucky for them getting back what they paid for it, and even keeping at 35% stake in the company.

What is strange is that Jim Goldman on CNBC said they paid “over 1 billion dollars” for Skype. Not sure where he came up with that number.

From an investor standpoint, NOT TECHNOLOGY standpoint, Skype can be looked at as the great-grand daddy of Twitter. It has a ton of potential, a large and growing customer base, but how do you make money with it?

What is clear from this move is that eBay’s vision of Skype never came to fruition and probably never could. Their visions of a grand open market place where a buyer could video chat with a seller with a single click, just isn’t in the cards. It would do wonders for their trust levels, but it just isn’t in the cards.

If I were still an eBay investor, I’d be content to know that the Skype acquisition didn’t turn out to be a big negative, and hopefully the company can re-focus on its core business. Four years of holding onto a company, and dumping it for what you paid for it is a decent situation in these times we are in.