Daily personal finance observation, musing and decisions in a journey toward financial independence by 36 with at least a million dollars.

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Moneysmartz helps connect individuals with the information and advice they need to organize, simplify, and strengthen their personal finances.

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Last news: December 11, 2007 22:26:08

Searching for rent vs. buy information about a local real estate market? HotPads.com combines maps, visual images, and information to give you a birds eye view of rental and buying opportunities in local markets. If you want to compare available sales and rentals by price range, then HotPads.com is worth a visit.

A recent post in The Red Tape Chronicles highlighted the fact that many Americans do not have an emergency fund to cover about 3- to 6-months of living expenses.

So, if you dont have enough socked away in your rainy day fund, then what can you do?

First, dont panic, you can start saving today and in less than a year youll be much better prepared.

Next, and this is hard to do, try to pay yourself first. Set aside a small amount every month before spending or investing. We are notoriously bad about taking action in this way, so continue reading.

Liz Pulliam Weston, an MSN personal finance columnist recommends getting a line of credit from your bank. If you do this, then be careful to avoid using the line to pay for non-emergency expenses. Otherwise, youll only dig a deeper hole.

By taking a few simple steps, youll be thankful when the rain starts to pour.

Approximately one year ago, there was a time when I was glued to the social personal lending site Prosper.com every morning, seeking and funding good loan proposals. In a matter of a few months, I underwrote 163 loans with a total of $14,880 at an average interest rate of 17.6%. I was hoping to make double-digit returns on my cashpile ...

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I am either the best customer of Citibank, or the worst, or both. You might have learned from Wall Street Journal that big sharks like hedge funds are running the carry trades by borrowing Japanese Yen at almost-zero interest and investing outside of the island country with much higher returns. Similarly, if you regularly read this little blog, you already ... (15 comments)

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For those of you who have the passion of managing your own investment, Im recommending a quick lesson on behavioral finance provided by Whitney Tilson, fund manager and investment columnist. What is behavioral finance? In short, "Behavioral finance attempts to explain how and why emotions and cognitive errors influence investors and create stock market anomalies such as bubbles and crashes."

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If you like being productive and saving time, then Lifehacker should keep you busy saving time. This popular site offers an array of software downloads and productivity tools covering many topics, including personal finance. Its not that difficult to find what you are looking for in Lifehacker, but to save you time, here are links to a few popular finance related topics: personal finance, money, saving money, tax time, taxes, and quicken.

How does your salary compare? What should you do to negotiate a pay raise? Youll find answers to these questions and more at PayScale, the market leader in global online compensation information for employers and individuals. PayScale was designed to give you the accurate facts and negotiation expertise you need in order to make smart, informed career decisions. A free compensation report and advice is available by completing a brief online questionnaire. If you are looking for an edge, then PayScale is worth a few minutes of your time.

The best way to combat the rising cost of college for your children is to begin saving as early as possible. A great way to jumpstart your savings and enjoy some valuable tax advantages is to enroll in an education 529 savings plan. With every state offering at least one 529 plan, its important to understand plan differences and choose the one best suited to your situation. Savingforcollege.com will help you understand the nuances of 529 plans with their Five-Cap ratings on each state-sponsored plan. The rating system determines the usefulness of each plan based on more than investment attractiveness including plan flexibility and additional economic benefits. By combining the benefits of saving early and often and understanding which 529 plan is best for your situation, youll have a fighting chance to help your children pay for college.

Stock markets continue to set new records, and so does our net worth. With over $26,000 gain in our diversified portfolio, coupled with strong cash flow production from Money Manager Co. and Perfect Future Publishing Co. but offset by some increased tax exposure, our bottomline improved by 30 grand in the month of May alone. In another record, for the ...

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Let me start this months installment of portfolio update with the announcement of changed format. As you can see below, the new design brought a few important changes: 1) Grouped by asset class (domestic equity, foreign equity, cash, etc.), instead of investment type (mutual fund, stock, cash, etc.) to better represent asset allocation 2) Improved breakdown of month-to-month changes; now ... (5 comments)

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A booming stock market is behind the stellar performance of our household finance in the past month. With over $38,000 in portfolio gains in the month, and continued cash flow generation from my day job and sideline business, our net worth broke into the 700s. The monthly improvement of $45,748 is the second best in record, only behind October 2005 ... (10 comments)

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One of the commentators to my last monthly portfolio update rightfully pointed out that Im not using the right benchmark to measure my portfolio performance. Given that Im positioning my portfolio for a sizable exposure to international equity, it is unfair to use S&P 500 as the benchmark. To fix this, Im going to construct a meaningful benchmark for my ... (9 comments)

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Back to 2003 when I started this blog, I wrote a post "Is $1,000,000 enough?" Then, I crafted a statistical model to argue that if I spend thrift and invest wise, one million dollars can be a good goal to support a happy retirement at 40. At that time, I just purchased our first house and started the American Dream ... (23 comments)

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My portfolio performed quite well in the month of March. The monthly gain of $13,120, or 1.9% of the portfolio size, is almost a full percentage point above the S&P 500 gains. The gain is helped by my sizable foreign equity exposure, and an opportunistic gain in a particular stock position. Below is the breakdown of my portfolio at the ... (9 comments)

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The dip in our net worth in February is, as I correctly predicted in last months summary, no more than noise in our march toward financial independence. Helped by a rebounding stock market and a surge of business income, our assets grew more than $24,000 in March. This also concludes the first quarter of 2007, in which our net worth ... (3 comments)

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In my daily job, I navigate different avenues of corporate finance and manage hundreds of millions dollar of annual budget. Outside of work, I read and research extensively about personal finance and play with my gold pot that will hopefully reach 7 figures in a couple of years. Corporate finance and personal finance by definition are very different disciplines, but ... (4 comments)

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After several months of astronomical growth, we have a sudden change of luck in February. Our net worth loss of over $7,500, primarily resulting from a loss in our employee stock option account, ended our streak of eight months of back-to-back net worth growth for a total of $210,000. Still, we believe this month is no more than an aberration ... (7 comments)

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February for the most part was actually pleasant. I spent some hardly-found time to carefully review my options in reengineering my portfolio, and speaking of investment performance, everything in my portfolio had been enjoying a good ride. Of course that is unti February 27th, where the global sell-off conveniently set me back by $24,000. I was hit particularly hard in ... (3 comments)

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The Shanghai Stock Exchange had never made Wall Street Journal headlines, until yesterday, where a 9% sell-off prompted a butterfly effect on all major stock exchanges across the world: Yesterdays plunge in stock prices around the world, including the steepest percentage decline in the Dow Jones Industrial Average in nearly four years, signals that investors may finally be re-evaluating their ... (3 comments)

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The pending roll-over of my 401(k) plan assets to traditional IRA truly allows me to examine my mutual fund strategy holistically. As I mentioned in my earlier posts, my primary objective in mutual fund investing is to build my foreign equity positions, and some domestic equity positions that complement my large-cap stock picks. The selection of mutual funds in my ... (7 comments)

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