Archive for January, 2011
« Previous Entries Next Entries »9 Reasons to Say “No” to Credit in 2011
Thursday, January 13th, 2011Interesting piece I found on Investopedia this morning: 9 Reasons to Say “No” to Credit. Their nine reasons: 1. Financing your purchases doesn’t teach self control. 2. Financing your purchases means you aren’t sticking to your budget. 3. Credit card interest rates are expensive. 4. Credit card interest rates increase when you can’t pay off [...]
iShares ETF Returns vs. the Underlying Index
Wednesday, January 12th, 2011I wanted to take a look at how well exchange-traded funds track their underlying indexes. So, I put together a spreadsheet to analyze the monthly returns of the ten iShares ETFs that track the ten sectors of the Dow Jones Total Market Index against their underlying index. I used only full-year data, which began in [...]
Question of the Day: 401(K) Contributions
Tuesday, January 11th, 2011As I was going over our finances at the end of 2010, I decided to increase our contributions to my wife’s 401(K) by two percentage points. We are now at 10%. We had done the maximum for a couple of years when she first started working but had to back off quite a bit after [...]
Annual Performance Ranking of Various iShares Exchange-Traded Funds
Monday, January 10th, 2011I spent some time putting together the returns of some different asset class (LargeCap, MidCap, SmallCap, International, Emerging Markets, REIT, and Bond) Exchange-Traded Funds offered through iShares. I then took that information and ranked the performance for each year. I only used full-year returns. The earliest year for full-year returns was 2002. Not all of [...]
Paul Farrell: America’s 10 Worst Years Start Right Now
Monday, January 10th, 2011A little doom and gloom for your Monday morning: America’s 10 Worst Years Start Right Now. Happy Monday, everyone!
My Advice to Those Just Starting Out: Keep Good Records
Wednesday, January 5th, 2011I spent the entire weekend organizing our files. I don’t know about you but going through files is like taking a walk down memory lane. There were the documents from our first mortgage (1999), medical files from my wife’s three pregnancies, pay stubbs going all the way back to 1998, 401(k) statements going all the [...]
The 7Twelve Portfolio’s Performance for 2010
Tuesday, January 4th, 2011Here are the year-end returns for the 7Twelve Portfolio that was detailed in Craig Israelsen’s book, 7Twelve: A Diversified Investment Portfolio with a Plan*: As you can see, the results looks pretty good—especially when you consider the fact that one-third of the portfolio is in bonds and cash. Dr. Israelsen gives much more detailed information [...]
« Previous Entries Next Entries »