Archives for July 2006

Where To Get Free Food On Your Birthday

Posted on July 18, 2006 // 22 Comments

komagataya.comMy buddy just had a free meal at Todai, a Japanese seafood and sushi buffet located primarily along the West Coast. They offer free meals to people on their birthday (they check ID), as long as you go with one paying customer. I usually avoid buffets, but where else can two people eat about five pounds of raw fish for $30? And unlimited crab legs. Mmm… I love sashimi. If you see a guy eating only the fish and leaving the rice balls underneath untouched, that’s me. Gotta save room!

Here’s a nice list of other places to get free food on your birthday. Many are just desserts or kids-only, but it includes such chains as Red Lobster, TGIFs, Baskin Robbins, and Burger King. Nothing I’d really go out of my way for, besides maybe Baskin Robbins 🙂

Filed Under: Frugal Living //

How Much Of My Income Should I Spend On A House?

Posted on July 16, 2006 // 76 Comments

My new favorite pastime is searching MLS listings for houses. Who needs baseball when you can drool over houses you can’t afford? Or can I?

I’m also reading Automatic Millionaire Homeowner by David Bach (free review copy, will give it away when I’m done). Inside it refers to the FHA guidelines for how much of your income should go towards your house payments. Specifically, lenders use a term called PITI – the sum of your mortgage principal, interest, (property) taxes, and insurance payments. To get an FHA-insured mortgage, your monthly PITI should be between 29% and 41% of your gross monthly income, depending on your other recurring debt such as credit cards or student loans. Let’s take a look at what that means:

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Real Estate //

American Express Version of Citi Dividend Card

Posted on July 15, 2006 // 25 Comments
Citi plus Amex logos

(This entry used to be about the Citi Dividend Card, but it has been discontinued. I’m going to wait for the dust to settle and put up some good alternatives.)

Another option is the one I took, which is to get the Citi Driver’s Edge Card.

Filed Under: Credit Cards //

Do You Have A Fun Money Account?

Posted on July 15, 2006 // 15 Comments

I tend to swing constantly between being really interested in trading individual stocks and then not looking at a quote for weeks. To make things worse, I live in the Pacific time zone and the markets close at 1pm here. I am not a morning person, which leaves me with about two hours to trade each day! :/

I’ve always liked the idea of keeping the majority of my retirement savings in index funds, but having a separate money account to try and “beat the market”, as everyone says. Maybe either give it $50 a month, or cap it at 5% of my net worth? I’ve read several investing books that mention this as a way to manage the urge to actively trade, but does anyone out there actually have one of these accounts? If so, do you recommend it?

Filed Under: Investing //

Avoiding ATM Fees Using the Grocery Store Trick

Posted on July 13, 2006 // 29 Comments

When I can’t find an ATM without fees, I just go into the nearest grocery store, and buy something small and pay for with the ATM card and ask for cashback. In urban areas I look for a drugstore like Walgreens. I’ve never had a surcharge, and it’s a ‘purchase’ so your own bank won’t charge you either for using a foreign ATM.

But what should you buy? If you buy something useless, that’s wasting money too right? If I see something on sale or need something anyways I’ll get it, but my standby is stamps. You’ll use them up sooner or later, the price is the same everywhere, and they don’t lose value.

Filed Under: Frugal Living //

Charlie Rose Show: Warren Buffett Interview

Posted on July 13, 2006 // 9 Comments

If you’re a Warren Buffett fan, you’ll enjoy this 3-part series by the Charlie Rose show on PBS, free for now via Google Video:

July 10, Monday – Warren Buffett: The Man
July 11, Tuesday – Warren Buffett: The Business
July 12, Wednesday – Warren Buffett: The Gift (not up yet)

From the brief bit I’ve seen, Buffett seems very energetic and interesting to listen to. I’ll definitely watch this later. Thanks to AK for the tip.

Filed Under: Investing //

SogoInvest Feature Review – New Discount Brokerage, $3 Trades

Posted on July 12, 2006 // 26 Comments
SogoInvest Logo

There is a new discount brokerage on the block – SogoInvest.com. Mentioned yesterday in the Wall Street Journal, this broker is interesting on a couple of levels.

Automatic Investing Broker King?
It’s obvious that this broker has buy-and-hold automatic brokers like ShareBuilder as one of its targets. It offers the same no minimums and easy dollar-cost-averaging via fractional shares and automatic weekly investing. But it’s cheaper. At the most basic plan, it offers $3 automatic trades vs. $4 at ShareBuilder. And whereas ShareBuilder charges $14.95 for real-time market trades, SogoInvest charges the same low $3. Nice.

If you want a lot of auto trades, you can get 15 free for $15/month, plus only $1 more for each additional one. Real-time trades are then only $1.50. However, if you truly want to “build your own mutual fund” with more than 20 stocks, FolioFN still offers 200 automatic trades per month, for $20/month or $200 a year.

Overall Discount Broker King?
Looked at another way, SogoInvest is just another really cheap discount broker. $3 a for market/limit orders is pretty solid. As an introductory offer, new signups at Sogo get $1 trades (both real-time and automatic) for 90 days. Note that IRAs are currently not available. A good question would be what kind of features they offer and how they compare with other brokers with trades in the $5-$7 range.

Still, I wouldn’t say they are the hands-down cheapest. MB Trading which still offers trades starting at only $1 (100 shares or less). Depending on your trading behavior, MB Trading or the similar Interactive Brokers might be cheaper.

Grant at TheCornerOfficeBlog has his own opinions on SogoInvest as well, and makes some good points.

I think that Sogo offers a good alternative to ShareBuilder (although SB has given me a decent amount of free money). But as a discount broker I’d weigh all the options first. Price is big, but not everything.

For me personally, I’m going to stick with Scottrade for my main account, and continue to tinker with my MB Trading account whenever I have enough time to do so. Of course, if they offer a juicy sign-up bonus…

Filed Under: Investing //

FruCall – Comparison Shopping On Your Cellphone

Posted on July 11, 2006 // 18 Comments
Frucall Logo

Most people know about online price comparison websites like Froogle or PriceGrabber, but what if you’re actually in a physical store and you need to find out if a price is good or not? Enter FruCall, which lets you find out the prices online, including shipping to your zip code, by calling them at 1-888-DO-FRUCALL and entering the UPC barcode number. I gave it a test run:
[Read more…]

Filed Under: Frugal Living //

Carnivals of Investing and More

Posted on July 11, 2006 // Leave a Comment

This week’s Carnival of Investing is up at Experiments in Finance. Next week’s edition will be hosted at Free Money Finance. For more information on participating and hosting schedule, please check out the Carnival of Investing Information Page.

In addition, MyMoneyBlog participated these other fine carnivals as well:

Carnival of Business at It’s Just Money.
Carnival of the Capitalists at Fat Pitch Financials.

Filed Under: General //

Sticking To Paper Bills…

Posted on July 11, 2006 // 37 Comments

You’d think that with all the accounts that I have, I would love getting my bills electronically. Nope. I recently tried to go 100% e-bill. Nearly ended very badly with multiple late payments. I get so many e-mails a day, it’s just too easy for me to put them off initially. Of course, if it then gets pushed off the first page of e-mails, I may never see it again for weeks.

Paper bills are nice in that even with a cluttered desktop, I still clean it off constantly and at most I wait a few days before paying the bill online. For some reason, also having a hardcopy of the bill for recordkeeping is comforting. Anyhow, not that anyone cares, but I’m now back to 100% paper bills. Even if Citi keeps dangling that $5 carrot to get me back…

Filed Under: Budgeting //

Getting A Credit Card to Give Me A Free Set of Tires

Posted on July 10, 2006 // 28 Comments

free tiresI just applied for the Citi Driver’s Edge Platinum MasterCard that I wrote more about previously. I’m driving a lot more this summer and therefore also spending a lot more on gas, so the 6% cash back on gas and groceries will come in handy. I’m also getting close to the $300 annual cap on my Dividend card this year, so I need another card anyways to fill that gap.

Also, I’ll also be able to rack up those Drive Rebates that give me cash for driving miles. If you drive enough, it effectively doubles your cash back percentage as the drive rebates match the cashback rebates. So in this case, you could get up to 12% back in the first year, and 6% back in subsequent years. I figured out that I can pay for my complete next set of 4 tires with this card:
[Read more…]

Filed Under: Credit Cards //

New Pinecone Survey Sign-up Link

Posted on July 9, 2006 // 4 Comments

There appears to be a new sign-up link for the online survey panel at Pinecone Research. If that one doesn’t work, the last sign-up link I mentioned is also working again. For some background, check out my brief Pinecone review here. Keep in mind these links tend to appear and disappear quickly. I just realized that I haven’t received one of their $5 surveys in a while. Maybe it’s because I moved? Or it just me? Link via Blueprint for Financial Prosperity.

Another online survey company that has paid out is Greenfield Online. I don’t they are quite as good as Pinecone, but there’s nothing wrong with signing up for both.

Filed Under: Bored Money //
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