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Category: General

The true cost of owning a home – or reasons why renting isn’t all that bad.

The true cost of owning a home – or reasons why renting isn’t all that bad.

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My wife and I were discussing whether her soon-to-be-married brother and his future wife should really be looking to purchase a home right away. Knowing what I know about the couple and my personal opinion about buy vs. rent I took the side of the argument that the couple definitely should not be looking to buy a house right now. The two of them are fresh out of college and from what I know don’t have a whole lot of money saved up. In fact I think they have some debt and are going even further in debt to pay for the wedding and honeymoon. Now at their age there is certainly nothing wrong with being in debt, especially if the reason for the debt is college education and well as much as I promote being frugal in all aspects of your life, you probably should enjoy your wedding/honeymoon as hopefully it’s an only once in a lifetime experience.

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The dreaded check engine light – what to do?

The dreaded check engine light – what to do?

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The check engine light came on in one of our cars sometime last week. Now before someone starts saying “I told you so that’s what you get for driving a POS”, it’s not on my Ford Escort – that one burned out a long time ago 😛 The light came on in my wife’s 1999 Honda Accord which well it’s worth at least 7 Escorts so I actually go to worry about the car getting wrecked which means I’m going to have to do something about the light.

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OT: The Bears still suck

OT: The Bears still suck

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[audio:http://www.bearsstillsuck.com/bearsuck.mp3]
Happy Schnapps Combo - The Bears still suck
(snippet didn't want to get in trouble by posting the whole song)

Well being from Wisconsin and a lifelong Packer fan it was with great joy that I watched the Bears lose in the super bowl last night. For those of you that don’t know the Packers vs. Bears riverly is one of the oldest and most fierce in all of professional football, and well I got lots of friends that are Bears fans so I’ve lived the experience my whole life….even got the “Bears Suck” t-shirt and cap to prove it. Well I know Packers didn’t even make the playoffs, but I’ll kick the Bears and their fans while they are down anyway 😉

Asset Allocation – If you are young why wouldn’t you be 100% stocks – Comments and Recap

Asset Allocation – If you are young why wouldn’t you be 100% stocks – Comments and Recap

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Well turns out that me suggesting that young people with long investing time horizons invest 100% in stocks sturred up a lot of activity on my blog and to be honest I never could have imagined I would have gotten so many high quality comments on this post. I’ve learned a lot in the process (I think) and I figured it would do good to sort of recap the comments from the other post and give a general idea of what my readers thought (or at least my convoluted interpretation of their thoughts).

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Asset Allocation – If you are young why wouldn’t you be 100% stocks?

Asset Allocation – If you are young why wouldn’t you be 100% stocks?

Comments 24 comments

I know I have had a few people comment on some of my posts that I’m too heavily weighted towards stocks (100%) and it’s sort of common knowledge that when laying out your asset allocation in your portfolio that it is a mixture of stocks and bonds. Even most lifestyle funds for the most risky aggressive young punk classification have some money in bonds. For some reason I can’t get it through my thick skull why someone would put any money in a historically lower performing investment tool for money that won’t be touched for 30 or more years.

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Retirement NestEgg Report – January 2007

Retirement NestEgg Report – January 2007

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Well it was another good month for my retirment nestegg. Gained over 4.5% and am inching closer to the $50,000 mark. It’s amazing how fast my nestegg continues to grow as just last December it was only at $24k and hopefully in two years time it will be close to $100k. Just goes to show you that if you stick to a plan of continually contributing to your retirement accounts it starts adding up. I mean when I started saving and investing I thought it would take decades for me to reach six figures and everytime I saw a blogger who had a net worth or retirement account that was over $100,000 I always thought wow that guy must make a lot of money to be able to save that much money. Turns out you don’t need to make that much money, those guys were probably just a couple years ahead of me and had the same rigorous saving mentality. Anywho here is where I stand as of today.

My Roth IRA – $11,366.56 (-0.30%)
Wife Roth IRA – $14,223.81 (+9.56%)
Traditional 401K – $11,933.34 (+2.00%)
Roth 401K – $11,406.00 (+6.27%)

Total Retirement Nest Egg $48,929.71 (+4.52%)

My first day at new job

My first day at new job

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Well today is my first day at my new employer. It was easy finding jobs, but is was difficult deciding which job was the best for me (as you can tell if you’ve followed my blog this month). Anyway today is a new start for me and hopefully puts me a couple steps closer to meeting my financial goals and needs. In fact in the near future I’m probably going to have to revisit my original financial goals as I’m afraid it’s just going to be too easy for me to reach my current set of goals due to the fact that I’m making more money now and well will be stuck contributing to a traditional 401k instead of a Roth 401k so I’ll be contributing a lot more principal now and won’t necessarily be better off for it.

Regardless I think today is a good day for me and hopefully a couple years down the road I’ll look back on this and decide a I made a wise decision.