Archive for December, 2007

Early in my wife’s pregnancy she registered on a couple of web sites to get free samples and discount coupons. One thing we get in the mail a lot was information about The GROW-UP Plan® from Gerber Life. Basically, it’s a whole life insurance plan that offers:

Whole Life Insurance up to $35,000
Automatically doubles [...]

I got a strange call yesterday — yes, a cold call. Wait a minute…did my do not call status expired?!? Anyway, the guy claimed he works for Ambit Energy, and he wanted to put me on a savings plan that will shave 7% off my Con Edison electricity charges and eliminate the 4% sales [...]

This question came to me when I was reading The Dough Roller’s post about why do mutual funds close to new investors. Part of the post read:
“…taxes for existing investors went up after a fund closed. Why? Because there was no longer an influx of new investors to share the tax burden.”

Photo via Wikipedia, [...]

1. Share Your Best Blog Post of 2007
To finish off the year and share the love with other bloggers who frequent my blog, I would like to feature one post from your blog. Please use the contact form to send me the URL to the post you would like me to share with my [...]

About two weeks ago, my friend at Being Frugal asked You Tell Me: Do You Have a Will? I do, but it’s so old, it’s probably useless…unfortunately. With the recent arrival of my son, it’s time for me to follow my own advice and create a basic will that will form the [...]

I just want say Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to all the readers, and fellow personal finance bloggers. Hope you have a happy time this holiday season.

The photo above was taken last Christmas at the Rockefeller Center. I will resume normal blogging schedule on Wednesday, December 26th. In the mean time, [...]

There are some really great marketing campaigns out there. So good in fact that you might believe they are head and shoulders above their competitors. So good that their brands became synonymous with their industry — at least, some of them got me convinced.

Car Insurance
When I think about car insurance, I think AllState [...]

I didn’t give this topic too much thought until very recently. While I was driving to work, I heard on the radio that you could give “Mall Cards” as a Christmas present. With one of these gift cards, the recipient isn’t restricted to buy something from just one store, he could buy anything [...]

Last Friday, my friend at Mrs. Micah: Finance for a Freelance Life started a writing project that asked us to share our best PF practices of the year. I thought it was an excellent way to wrap up the year, so I will add my two cents here. I wanted to refer [...]

In Using Simple Rules to Predict your Retirement Needs, I passively mentioned using 80% rule to calculate retirement needs. You may have heard this rule before; here is a variation of it:

“You need 80% of your pre-retirement income during your retirement.”

A Bit of Reality
Now, that statement is just a rule of thumb and is [...]