investing

How We Invest

August 19, 2010

A reader asked me yesterday about our investing strategy, as I had mentioned a couple years ago that I was buying a socially responsible ETF (a clean energy fund).  Turns out, that purchase wasn’t my best choice ever.  My timing could have been better… I bought it in September 2008, and we all know what [...]

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A New Credit Card With Sweet Rewards

March 23, 2010

Ever since we got married, we’ve been using a Visa credit card that gives us 1% cash back on everything we spend.  We always take the rewards in the form of a cash credit to our balance, and have always been happy with the card.  But after seven years, we’re switching to a new card. [...]

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Bogleheads

March 22, 2010

I wanted to share a good forum with you all.  Some of you are probably already regular visitors to Bogleheads, but if you aren’t, I highly recommend it.  The tagline of the forum says “investing advice inspired by the example of Jack Bogle” (Jack Bogle started Vanguard), although the topics discussed extend beyond just investing [...]

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Our New Retirement Accounts

February 23, 2010

Back before we became self-employed, my husband and I each worked for a large company, and we both had 401k accounts.  When we quit our jobs, we rolled those accounts over to IRAs, and that has been our retirement savings ever since.  In the early days, we didn’t contribute anything at all, but gradually worked [...]

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Keeping Track Of Our Spending

September 14, 2009

Recently I got an email from a long-time reader, asking me if we still keep track of our monthly expenses.  I guess the answer is both yes and no.  We do pay close attention to what we are spending, and I check our bank balances and credit card transactions on a daily basis.  But we [...]

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Diversify By Paying Down The Mortgage

October 8, 2008

As I mentioned yesterday, our stock-based retirement portfolio is looking a little rough around the edges these days (and I’m sure it’s even worse now than it was yesterday – but I’m not looking).  Times like these are when I’m glad that we’re focusing on paying off our mortgage as quickly as possible, in addition [...]

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A Painful Look At Our Retirement Accounts

October 8, 2008

Over the last few weeks, as the stock market kept dropping, I decided I just wasn’t going to look at our retirement account values for a while. After all, we’re in our early 30s and have many years to go before we’ll be using those funds. But tonight I decided to take a peek, after [...]

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OK, Now I Really Have My ETF

September 19, 2008

Well crud.  That exchange traded fund purchase I made last night didn’t go through.  The markets had already closed by the time I settled on GEX, and it had closed at $42something.  I had talked to a rep at Ameritrade who said that if the price for the number of shares I bought went higher [...]

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Bought My Exchange Traded Funds

September 18, 2008

Earlier this week, we made our final 2008 deposit into my Roth IRA.  I had let the money accumulate in a money market all year, in anticipation of buying an ETF once I maxxed out the account (my plan is to buy one ETF per year, in order to minimize the amount I pay in [...]

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Trying To Find An ETF I Can Believe In

August 5, 2008

We’ve almost checked everything off our financial goals list for the year. Not bad, since we still have almost five months to go. We’ve maxxed out the HSA, and my husband’s IRA is on an automatic deposit schedule that will reach $5000 by December. We’ve paid off $5000 in our HELOC, which continues to be [...]

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