MoneyMerc

[First post of the year - work has been crazy lately, but I still intend to post at least once per month, with my goal at twice.  Thanks for reading and commenting!]

photo by emdot
These are tough times.  Everyone seems to be trying to save a little more, and spend a little less.  Watch out though, [...]

Money-wise, it’s been a tough year for almost everyone.  One of the many problems with widespread economic distress is people start cutting their spending in the fastest possible ways – unfortunately that often means chopping the annual charitable donations.  This year, the problem is immeasurably worse, since the big guys are toning down donations as [...]

To be sure, maybe people have found they have a whole new risk tolerance this year.  Even investors who were ’safely’ index fund investing realized that even though they own the whole market, they still own stocks, and stocks by are risky investments.
The Finance Buff posts an interesting article on a way to determine your [...]

This post isn’t about promoting a brokerage house – it’s about choosing the right place to put your money, for efficiency and convenience. Picking the right place to put your money can save you lots of headaches and hours and hours of time through the course of your investing life.  Here’s my thoughts on the [...]

If you’re invested in the stock market, chances are you don’t have positive returns for the year. If you want to improve your returns, keep in mind that the investment return equation is pretty much the same as the net income equation: you can directly improve your returns by lowering your taxes.
Total Investment Returns = [...]

I just returned from a trip to South Africa, and after ignoring the news for two weeks, I was a bit surprised to see the major market indicies.  Guess what my (no-so-)new investment strategy is?  Read my last post for an idea.
Today, my friend Dave sent me an article from today’s WSJ by Burton Malkiel [...]

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last two weeks (or last year, for that matter), you know some serious stuff is going on in the US and World financial markets.
Here are some tips to navigate in this type of environment:

Worry about the things you can control – are you more likely to [...]

Death.  Not a topic many people like to think or talk about.  But deciding to have a couple key conversations can make your life much easier.  Plus it might be a good investment decision at the same time.  If death bothers you, take a deep breath, grit your teeth and read on – doing so [...]

Nooo!
Ok… so we aren’t talking about bridges or anything, despite this crazy picture…
We are talking about “jumping” savings accounts to take advantage of better rates. Granted, high savings accounts rates these days are slim pickin’s, but you can tell from the font size of %-rates in newspapers how much banks want to [...]

(Warning: this article is long, and gets technical at times. In general, my mission is to state concepts simply and concisely, so this goes against that mantra. But I wanted to share my full experience because I think it is very similar to what you may experience in the future. If [...]