It has taken a few weeks, but I have finally overcome the stock markets woes of August. My net worth is finally above it was in July. It was a pretty ugly few weeks, but it definitely underscores the importance of staying in the market. If you get of it you are more than likely going to loose out on the recovery and subsequent gains. Here are my financial updates:Assets +$62, 224.91 over last yearLiabilities -$14,015.95 than last yearNet Worth + $76, 240.86 than last year I am pretty happy with the performance. I would like to increase my net worth $100,000 year over year, but it will remain if I can accomplish this goal.
Michael Vick has formally entered his guilty plea under a prearranged plea bargain. The NFL has suspended him indefinitely. I wish the federal prosecutors had not entered into a plea with him and let him face a jury under racketeering charges too, but I guess bird a hand holds true especially with celebrity defendants. He will not be sentenced for some months, but it is excepted to be a year to a year and a half jail time.
Anthony Wilson, founder of Factory Records and the driving force behind the Manchester scene died on August 10, 2007 from complications of kidney cancer. He was the main focus of the movie “24 Hour Party People“. He began as a local news reporter who became the driving force behind the bands like Happy Mondays and New Order. He also founded Factory Records and opened the legendary Hacienda club.
A couple of a days ago, I started to get an influx of spam that was coming from the contact form from here. Thanks to Douglas Karr who modified the original version of the wordpress plugin. He added a challenge question which should cut down on the blog spam.
We are lucky in Dallas to have several published technical authors in the area. One of the better authors, Craig Walls is very generous with his time by speaking at the Dallas Java Users Group and the Spring Users Group. Last night was the release of the second edition of his book, Spring In Action. His talk was very good covering some of the basic uses of The Spring Framework which is a very large framework.Craig did point something that I had not thought about before. Spring has a lot of subprojects to it which do a lot of things (Boilerplate code for JDBC and JMS, remoting, MVC framework, etc), but its core functionality is dependency injection and aspects (AOP). Then everything else is an extension of these two core functionality. That was a very eye opening statement. I very much enjoyed his talk last night as I did with his two session at the Dallas No Fluff Just Stuff symposium. I was lucky enough to win a free ecopy of his book. I look forward to reading it.
My year 0% financing promo is coming to end the middle of next month (September). My plan is to transfer the money that I borrowed from Citibank and Discover from my money market fund at Fidelity a few days before the due date. I can then pay off Citibank and Discover before the promotional rate expires. I am pretty happy with the results of this. My original goal for this was to two-fold. The first was to stop paying interest on a HELOC which was at a little over $5,000 and the other was to generate extra interest income. After a the year, the HELOC will remain at 0 since I have saved enough to cover the borrowed money. I have also generated around $300 in free interest income on the residual of what I borrowed from on the 0% cards and the $5,000 from the HELOC. This is not a lot, but it sure beats the interest I would have been paying on the HELOC. I definitely think I met both goals. My next step after I pay off the two balances is to wait around six weeks and get a copy of my credit report. I want to make sure that the balances have cleared from it. I am then going to embark on a second round of an app o’rama. This time I am going to apply for hopefully around fifteen or so cards. I want to borrow a lot more at zero percent and then generate a lot more in interest income this time.
I have been a very dedicated Americano fan for a number of years. I recently tried a new drink at my favorite coffee shop, Dunn Brothers here in Addison. The drink is a iced coffee nirvana. It consists of a cold-pressed coffee (more on this in a bit), milk, and vanilla syrup. The drink does not pack the big caffeine punch like the Americano, but it has a great flavor. I think cutting my caffeine consumption would be a good thing. I decided that I could save quite a bit of money if I made it home instead of going to Starbucks during the the week. It is a pain to brew espresso at home especially in the morning before work. Dunn Brothers is not on the way to work so my visits were contained to the weekends.I did some research on cold-pressed coffee. I found that the main producer of cold presses was a company named Toddy. I ordered this, and I got it the next day. It shipped from Houston. I got a pound of Anniversary Blend beans from Dunn Brothers and brewed it. After playing with the proportions a bit, I really enjoyed it so much so that I have been having several a day. My savings is being more than offset by my increased consumption, but I should be drinking less of them once the newness wears off.My Dad is a big coffee drinker, and he also suffers from over production of stomach acid. The cold-pressed coffee contains a lot less acid than traditional brewed coffee. I figured it would make a good gift for him. When I was talking to him on the phone, I asked him if he had ever had cold-pressed coffee. He said no, but a fellow board of directors member of his old company had a company that made them. He thought for a while and said the name of the guy was Todd Simpson and the company name was called Toddy. What a coincidence! His old company had started in Houston. It is a small world. I think I am going to get him a cold press for Christmas. I hope he enjoys it.
Have you ever seen Mad Money on CNBC? The host of the show is named Jim Cramer. His show consists of a very fast paced call ins from viewers and him giving stock tips. I have always thought he was nutty and not much an analyst. Watch this video and draw your own conclusions about his sanity:
Don’t you feel sad about the Bear Stern employees that are losing their jobs? There is no telling what they were making, but I can safely say it was a lot more than you or me. The Wall Street firms have been doing very well over the past few years with all of the merger and acquisition activity.He has missed on quite a few areas. He stated about six months ago that the housing market was fine. This turned out to be so so wrong which is ironic since the sub-prime meltdown is the subject of the video.
We got this news today; Adobe is pulling the plug on the Send To FedEx Kinkos. I worked a bunch of hours on it over late winter and early spring. It is a bummer, but life does goes on. It is funny since we just added two new app servers to the cluster for it. On a lighter note, I am taking next week off. It has been quite a while since I have had this much time off. I do not typically take a lot of vacation. It is always nice to get it paid out when you leave a job. Even with the bad news, I do not have happy feet yet.