mind tricks

These past weeks, my family and I have been shopping for a minivan to accommodate our extended family of 7 — and finally replacing our 11 years old Ford Contour. The experience left me wondering if the auto industry really needs the bail out money at all. If I have to judge by how some [...]

Until recently, Intuit’s Quicken Online costs $2.99 per month after a 60-day free trial period. Beginning October 13th, 2008 there is no longer a fee to use the Quicken Online program — yes, it’s free!  Since I like free stuff, I signed up yesterday to get some first hand experience.  In short, I liked it.  [...]

Investing in the stock market is a risky business if you don’t know what you’re doing.  Even if you do, it’s possible to lose a lot of money — e.g., Bear Stearns, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, etc.  Personally, I have moved away from individual stock picking for many years now, and embrace investing mechanics that [...]

It’s hard to believe that I have been blogging about personal finance for one full year. Overall, I have to say that it’s a success in many ways. Specifically, I was able to meet the three goals I had set for myself at the beginning:

To learn more about financial concepts and improve my finances
To supplement [...]

My family is going on a vacation for a few days. We’re going as far south as Virginia Beach on this trip and I look forward to see the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel and neighboring area. I will be resuming my normal schedule by July 14th. I wish everyone a happy and safe 4th of July [...]

You would never take out an insurance policy on behalf of your bank and pay its premiums, would you? But that’s exactly what you’re doing when your credit card company convinces you to buy life and disability insurance. The sales pitch plays upon fears of the unknown:

What if you became ill or disabled and couldn’t [...]

This has been another great week for the M-Network with our aggregate feed now moved to FeedBurner Ad Network. For our subscribers, this mean faster feed, less encoding errors, and you can actually see who wrote the post now! As always, we are committed to provide high-quality full feed.
Group Writing Project
On the week of November [...]