Shay’s Blog

It has been a while since I have posted a financial update. I am happy with the financial progress I have made in 2006. My assets increased by $52,157.93 while my liabilities decreased by $9,776.00 which increased my net work by $61,933.93. I hope to maintain this trend year over year, but it will be hard the first quarter of 2007. The reason for this difficulty will be hard was I was working contract for the first four months of last year. (more…)

I was checking the market performance today on http://finance.yahoo.com and this article was one the features: http://finance.yahoo.com/columnist/article/richricher/11429. You might be familiar with the article’s author, Robert Kiyosaki. He wrote Rich Dad, Poor Dad which is one of the more popular personal finance books published. He is also seen on TV promoted his book and seminar materials. Later in the evening I was reading the finance section on fatwallet and there was a thread on the Kiyosaki article. (more…)

These are some interesting statistics courtesy of the Dallas Morning News. Funny that Collin County used to be one of the top-ten highest median income counties in the country. Not anymore. The debt figures are staggering. The median household income is 70,784, but the media household network is only 97,750. What is everyone planning on retiring on? The average loan or lease is 20,940 is higher than every other county on the list. Dallas suffers from a materialistic attitude. A lot of people subscribe to the philosophy you have to keep up with everyone else. In the Uptown area of Dallas, there are a five or six high-rise condominiums going up. They start out at around a million apiece and go up. It is simply amazing how many people that think they can afford to live in something like that.

I got this from www.mymoneyblog.  This looks like a possibility to put proceeds from your zero percent APR credit card money.  It takes 5,000 to open the account, but only 500 to maintain it.  I am not sure how easy it is get money out of this account.  It is FDIC insured.

Bank of America put a couple of holds on the deposits from the balance transfers. The first one expired on Friday so I put that money ($4,850.00) towards my HELOC. This payment dropped the balance of the HELOC to $259.34. On Tuesday the other hold from Bank of America (BOA) expired so I initiated a bill payment for the payoff amount of $262.92. Do not ask me how the payoff is $3.58 higher than balance. (more…)

I got the balance transfer checks deposited yesterday. I will transfer the funds to Fidelity on Tuesday after Bank of America releases the hold on the funds. I have spent a lot of time working on Quicken the past few months. I can say that my Quicken data has never looked this good. All of my accounts are now accurately presented in Quicken. In the past, Fidelity always gave me issues. I finally figured out why Quicken was getting out of synch with Fidelity. There were two places that Quicken and Fidelity were not jiving. (more…)

It’s only Thursday night, but I am so looking forward to the weekend. I have got to head up to Plano tomorrow for a 2 hour compliance meeting. Yuck! I have got a ton to do at work tomorrow so hopefully I can get of there and enjoy the last of the summer hours at work. I have got a crazy weekend ahead of me this weekend. (more…)

I thought I would create a separate post on my financial information. I decided to do a mini application o’rama the other day. For those that do know what this is, it is a flurry of credit card applications to minimize the credit score hit. The reason for applying for all these credit cards is to take advantage of zero percent apr offers that are offered. Then you take the borrowed money and put into a high-yielding account like a money-market mutual fund. Basically you get free money between the interest you are paying which is zero in this case and the prevailing interest rate on money market which is currently in the low five percents. There are two caveats to doing this, one you take a credit score hit of 50 to 100 points during this time. My score is currently in the low 800’s. I will see what it ends up at after I get everything established. (more…)