I never want to leave my money in my smart funds and not understand how to anitipcate events like this downturn in the marketplace…

Last night I read a good review of this book

Stocks for the Long Run

I came across this cool website database that is FREE to use and it tells you if there is MONEY sitting somewhere with your name on it that you may not know about!!

Dont Laugh, It’s True!!

I ran a bunch of my family names thru the system and it turns out that my very own little hubby has some money unclaimed in Texas. It was so easy to do I just answered a few questions, Printed out the form, completed it and sent it along with copies of his identification.

CLICK HERE TO FIND YOUR MONEY

Happy Searching….

} The Mrs {

Well we made a Financial Mark stepping stone….

We have now surpassed our 8 month Mark of Living CASH ONLY!! Yippee!!

We do not use Credit Cards for anything we have, vacations we take, things we do or buy…..It is soooo liberating!!

We have increased our income as well as all of our portfolios by 30-50% and continue consistent deposits into our Savings Accounts. We have increased our Life insurance and retirement plans and have also been able to start a consistent savings plan for our nephew and his future.

The 2 Cars are paid off and we are working on the 3rd….

By this time next year we should be completely Debt Free!!

…..Unless of course we end up Buying another home ;0)

The Pursuit is what we were promised, go out and pursue your happiness today.

You are the only ones who can make a difference in how your life is lived and the freedoms that remain,
} The Mrs {

“There are three ways to make money. You can inherit it. You can marry it. You can steal it.”
– conventional wisdom in Italy

Most people who are rich chose their parents wisely. Bill Gates might not have ever figured out 1960s-style computer science but he had the foresight to pick a father who is one of the richest, most prominent lawyers in the state of Washington. And before he and Paul Allen made the deal with IBM that gave them a monopoly on the PC operating system, Bill had the foresight to choose a mother who was personally acquainted with John Opel, CEO of IBM Corporation. None of this would have worked if Bill hadn’t been willing to take tremendous personal risks. Should Microsoft have failed, of course, Bill Gates would have had nothing to fall back on but a million dollar trust fund from his mother’s parents (bankers) and the resumption of his degree program at Harvard College.

If Donald Trump had taken the millions he inherited from his father and put it all into mutual funds, you’d never have had to suffer through one of his books. But he’d be just as rich or richer today.

Common stocks have returned an average of 7 percent per year, adjusted for inflation. If you are way smarter, luckier, and less risk-averse than all of the companies in the United States, you may be able to do substantially better. But a return on investment of 200 percent per year is not very exciting when you only have a few hundred dollars in capital. That’s why it is so important to pick your parents carefully.

Common Stocks and the Efficient Market Hypothesis

Suppose somehow that you collect a non-negligible amount of cash and want to invest it. If you are investing for the long-haul, then common stocks are your only reasonable choice since they offer the best return. According to the Efficient Market Hypothesis, all stocks are fairly valued because everyone on Wall Street has the same information. So unless you have friends who will give you insider information, there is no reason that you should buy Microsoft rather than General Motors. Sure, Microsoft has a monopoly and GM doesn’t, but Microsoft’s monopoly is already reflected in their lofty price/earnings ratio and GM’s perennial engineering and management problems are already reflected in their absurdly low price/revenue ratio.If you buy into the Efficient Market Hypothesis then you’re just as happy to buy a portfolio of stocks selected by throwing darts at the inside pages of the Wall Street Journal. In fact, the WSJ for many years pitted expert wall street analysts against a dartboard portfolio and the darts almost always did better. If you don’t have very much money, then a problem with a dartboard portfolio is that you will only be able to buy a few stocks. Your expected return will still be 7 percent per year but the variance will be extremely high because one company going bust could wipe out all of your gains.

Mutual Funds

Here’s where Wall Street professionals step in, eager to help you. If you don’t like all that risk, join our mutual fund, the Chump Fund. You give us $10,000 and we’ll give you a share in our $10,000,000 portfolio with lots of different stocks, all chosen by Harvard MBAs. We’ll skim 2% off the top every year to pay for our office space, salaries, computers, and mailing out advertisements to other people like yourself. You might not like paying the 2%, but look at how much better we’ve done than the S&P 500 index over the last five years.So you buy into the Chump Fund. Halfway through the year, the Harvard MBAs are tired of their drab offices and Pentium computers. Do they take part of the 2% and move uptown and then buy Pentium Pros? No. They discover all of a sudden that they shouldn’t have any General Electric. Westinghouse is really a better investment. And Ford is looking better than Chrysler now too. In fact, the entire $10,000,000 portfolio needs to be traded. Do your mutual fund managers, who’ve sworn to look out for your best financial interests, execute the trades with the broker who has the lowest commissions? No. After all, the money for trading commissions comes out of your 98% and not their 2% (read the fine print). So why not go to a “full-service” broker with high commissions? That broker will be so grateful that he’ll discover he has a whole bunch of office space uptown that he isn’t using, already equipped with a bunch of Pentium Pros. He’d be delighted to allow his best customers at the Chump Fund to hang out rent-free.

In your naivete, you might call this a kickback but in the industry it is known as “soft money.” Every time the Chump Fund trades with a broker, they accumulate some soft money that they can spend on computers, furniture, data feeds, etc. This comes on top of the opera tickets, broadway shows, limousines, and the rest of the Wall Street lifestyle that is paid for by Mr. and Mrs. Middleamerica.

If the Chump Fund keeps on doing this, eventually their return will be much lower than the S&P 500 and they won’t be able to run those nice-looking advertisements anymore. What do they do? Look among the 20,000 tiny little mutual funds out there. Find one that has randomly achieved above-average performance for the past five years. Call it the Chump Growth and Income Fund and run ads showing its past performance. Send letters to all the old Chump Fund customers telling them that the Chump Fund is being closed and, unless they object, their investments will be rolled into the new Chump Growth and Income Fund as of September 1.

An even better strategy for a mutual fund company is to do all of this in-house. If they have 50 mutual funds they can just hang onto the ones that randomly do better than average and flush the ones that do noticeably worse. Then at any time they can show that “45 out of our 50 funds outperform the indices”. Now you know why you can’t find any mutual funds advertised in the Wall Street Journal that sport worse-than-average performance.

OK, so you expected to get cheated a bit by these Wall Street types. But they’re experts so of course they will do a better job picking stocks, won’t they? Some will. But with tens of thousands of mutual funds out there, even if they are all choosing stocks at random, you’d expect some to do consistently much better than average and some to do consistently much worse. You’d find, however, that most of them would fall in the middle, forming a Gaussian curve.

That’s what Burton Malkiel expected to find. He was an economics professor at Princeton who made his life’s work the study of investment. When he charted the performance of all the mutual funds, they did indeed form a bell curve. But the center was not the same as the S&P 500. It was shifted slightly to the left. That’s right, the average mutual fund was underperforming the blind index by a couple of percentage points. This confused Malkiel until he realized that the discrepancy could be accounted for by the expenses skimmed off the top of the mutual funds and also the commissions they paid to trade the portfolio. [Note: these curves are published in Malkiel’s excellent A Random Walk Down Wall Street, an essential book to read before investing.]

Index Funds

Anyway, the long and the short of it is that the index outperforms 85 percent of actively managed mutual funds. This is an argument for buying a dartboard portfolio or, if you don’t like the volatility, an index fund. One of the first companies to offer these funds was Vanguard. I have been a Vanguard customer for many years and have been mostly satisfied. Here are the main problems with Vanguard:

• poorly programmed Web site: (1) tax forms are offered only in a bizarre Adobe format that cannot be saved, printed, or emailed to an accountant, (2) terrible internal email system that simply throws away your message if you spend too long composing it
• customer service that gets worse as you get richer; the folks who answer the phone for the $15,000 IRA crowd are very well informed, can get you the necessary forms or information, and can help you with a transaction; if you get rich enough to be upgraded to Flagship ($1 million+), you get assigned the Vanguard equivalent of a private banker; mine was unable to send email, pick up the phone, send me the right paperwork to get transactions accomplished, keep focus on getting a transaction through. It was dangerous to be a Flagship customer because I thought that someone at Vanguard was going to make something happen when in fact he was just sitting at his desk waiting for me to call him. The solution is to downgrade from Flagship back to Voyager or Voyager Select.

Besides getting a higher average return, there are many other good reasons to invest your money in index funds. The first is psychological. When I had individual stocks, every time a stock went up, I attributed it to luck. Every time a stock went down, I attributed it to idiocy on my part. I felt dumber and dumber with every passing year because I ignored the stocks that went up and focussed on the ones that dived. Some Wall Street types have the opposite psychology: they only remember their winners and hence come to think of themselves as Einsteins after five years. Whatever your psychology, there is a certain inner peace to be achieved by forgetting about your money.

Another reason to index is to free up time to make more money. In every office there is at least one sorry loser checking the market every ten minutes, going home at night to read financial reports, running charts, and buying software to manage his complex portfolio. If he were a managing a $10 billion mutual fund, perhaps this effort would be worth it. But to try to beat the index by 2% with a portfolio of $50,000? That’s $1,000 extra/year. Even assuming that he can get that extra 2%, he would have earned far more per hour working the night shift at the local 7-Eleven. Your time is valuable. If you must be greedy, then be greedy and smart and take a consulting job. Or enjoy the extra time with your friends and family. Don’t waste it trying to beat the market.

I have oversimplified things a bit here. For example, even if you believe the Efficient Market Hypothesis, there are stocks that are inherently more volatile than others. E.g., a high-tech company will go up more in a market boom and go down more in market bust than will a utility. In some sense, both are “worth their price” but one or the other might be a better buy for you because of your level of risk aversion. If you want to understand this stuff at a deep level, read A Random Walk Down Wall Street and then Principles of Corporate Finance by Brealey and Myers. The latter book is the textbook used in many advanced finance course taken by MBAs. An MBA student will spend the entire term going through the book and doing problems, but if you have a standard MIT freshman math and science background, you can read the whole thing in a night or two.

If I haven’t convinced you to stay away from Wall Street esoterica, here are a few things I’ve learned through bitter personal experience and/or reading the above books…

Vanguard 500 Index;Inv VFINX (FUND) 11.64%
since 08/31/76

For tax efficiency the Vanguard 500 index fund would be one good choice.
During 10 years this fund has lost only 0.5% to taxes annually.

Vanguard 500 Index;AdmVFIAX (FUND) 1.97%
since 11/13/00

VUSXX ? 1.0 unch

Vanguard Asset Alloc;Inv VAAPX (FUND) 10.73%
since 11/03/88

Vanguard Asset Alloc;AdmVAARX (FUND) 5.72%
  since 10/23/58

Vanguard Windsor II;Inv VWNFX (FUND) 11.95%
since 06/24/85

windsorI is available $3,000 under

Vanguard Windsor;InvVWNDX (FUND)  11.80%

My favorite Vanguard fund is the Global Equity fund.
Well diversified. Not too tax efficient though.
During 10 years this fund has lost almost 1.4% annuallly to taxes.
But it has outperformed the 500 index fund over 10 years by 4.6% annually. Based on past history which of course may not hold true for the next 20 years, that extra 4.6% would mean to you an extra $49,000

Vanguard Glbl Eqty;InvVHGEX (FUND) 11.83%
since 08/14/95

Between September 30, 2008 my account statement reflected a loss of earnings due to the recent stock market volatility and financial sector crisis.

You can also contact an individual counselor who can access your account information and respond to your specific account related questions.

Vanguard  1-800-662-2003

EEEK the worst performance by any Janus fund has out-performed the best TIAA-CREF fund by a whopping 5% over the last three years . . .
percentages are for annual average…
TIAA-CREF:Bond PlusTIPBX (FUND) 6.15%
since 9/30/97

TIAA-CREF:Equity Idx TCEIX (FUND) 2.16%
since 4/30/00

TIAA-CREF:Growth EquityTIGEX (FUND) 2.7%
since 9/30/97

TIAA-CREF:High-Yld BondTCHYX (FUND) 7.94%
since 4/30/05

TIAA-CREF:Intl EquityTIINX (FUND) 10.3%
since 9/30/97

TIAA-CREF:Mgd AllocTIMAX (FUND) 7.02%
since 9/30/97

TIAA-CREF:Short-Trm Bond TCSTX (FUND) 5.25%
since 04/03/00

TIAA-CREF:Social Chce Eq TCSCX (FUND) 2.20%
since 04/03/00

TIAA-CREF:Tax-Ex Bond TCTEX (FUND) 5.88%
since 03/01/00

TIAA-CREF: LIFECYC 2010 TCLEX (FUND) 6.89%
since 10/15/04

TIAA-CREF LIFECYC 2015 TCLIX (FUND) 7.29%
since 10/15/04

TIAA-CREF LIFECYC 2020 TCLTX (FUND) 7.47%
since 10/15/04

TIAA-CREF LIFECYC 2025 R TCLFX (FUND) 7.67%
since 10/15/04

TIAA-CREF LIFECY2030 TCLNX (FUND) 7.81%
since 10/15/04

TIAA-CREF LIFECYC 2035 TCLRX (FUND) 8.22%
since 10/15/04

TIAA-CREF LIFECYC 2040 TCLOX (FUND) 8.78%
since 10/15/04

TIAA-CREF BD PLUS11 RETL TCBPX (FUND) 4.30%
since 03/31/06

TIAA-CREF BD PLUS11 RETRTCBRX (FUND) 4.16%
since 03/31/06

TIAA-CREF BD FD RETIREMTTIDRX (FUND) 5.39%
since 03/31/06

TIGIX ?

We found another new awesome way to upgrade our portfolio and wanted to SHARE it with all of you.

This Sharebuilder program with INGDirect that allows you to keep control over your investments and educates you every step of the way. You can make one time investments whenever you want or you can set up a program that works for you and will be set up to trade and buy when you tell it to.  For example our program will buy in to 2 Mutual Fund Accounts and purchase 2 specific stocks every 3rd Tuesday.  But if we dont like what we see that month we can trade, sell or redirect. We started it this week (Tuesday) and already saw a 35% return on what we invested.
With this Sharebuilder program, our already existing out right purchase of several stocks with stock certificates, Merrill Lynch Mutual Fund and our ING Account we hoping we are on the right path for our nephews college, any potential Anderson clones and our retirement…..
Good luck if you decided to take advantage of our advice and Happy Investing,
Heather & Aaron Anderson

look at the current energy prices here [ Bloomberg’s energy price index ]

When gasoline first hit $3, we all complained and said consumers can’t afford it… at least I know I DID … did you notice gas went up ? lol well I thought a glimpse of hope was on the horizon but now gas is back over $3, and suddenly it’s no longer on CNBC.

The fact there’s no pushback from consumers (how could we?) that tells me prices will continue to rise even higher even upto “I am Legend”’s $6.95 ?!?!? Gawd help us !

I wish I knew how to engineer green alternatives… Oil tycoons would probably suppress me and kill me off if I was successful… I’d feel like Tesla even (not that I believe I could even keep such great company) …

Unhappy consumers are accusing gas stations of price gouging. Oil company CEOs seem to be pointing fingers at hedge funds. Economists predicted that $3 gasoline would tip the U.S. economy into recession. I hope not but Im afraid we are already there… And most notable for our purposes, oil company shares went absolutely crazy: The S&P energy index rose 24 percent in four months, Im glad I have some investment in this fund.

I personally DO prefer performance appreciation verses dividend annuals…

so where does this leave me ?
what is my Buying Power really ?
what potential do I have to truly capitalize on P/E ratios when all is effected by the energy Index one way or another…

Did you know

Only buy or fill up your car or truck in the early morning when the ground temperature is still cold. Remember that all service stations have their storage tanks buried below ground. The colder the ground the more dense the gasoline, when it gets warmer gasoline expands, so buying in the afternoon or in the evening….your gallon is not exactly a gallon.

…

When you’re filling up do not squeeze the trigger of the nozzle to a fast mode. If you look you will see that the trigger has three (3)stages: low, middle, and high. In slow mode you should be pumping on low speed, thereby minimizing the vapors that are created while you are pumping.
All hoses at the pump have a vapor return. If you are pumping on the fast rate, some other liquid that goes to your tank becomes vapor. Those vapors are being sucked up and back into the underground storage tank so you’re getting less worth f! or your money.

…

One of the most important tips is to fill up when your gas tank is HALF FULL or HALF EMPTY. The reason for this is, the more gas you have in your tank the less air occupying its empty space. Gasoline evaporates faster than you can imagine. Gasoline storage tanks have an internal floating roof. This roof serves as zero clearance between the gas and the atmosphere, so it minimizes the evaporation. Unlike service stations, every truck loaded is temperature compensated so that every gallon is actually the exact amount.

…

Another reminder, if there is a gasoline truck pumping into the storage tanks when you stop to buy gas, DO NOT fill up–most likely the gasoline is being stirred up as the gas is being delivered, and you might pick up some of the dirt that normally settles on the bottom. Hope this will help you get the most value for your money.

…

Nothing is more frustrating than the feeling that every time I fill-up the tank, I am sending my money to people who are trying to kill me, my family, and my friends! .

I thought it might be interesting for you to know which oil companies are the best to buy gas from and which major companies import Middle Eastern oil.

These companies import Middle Eastern oil:

Shell…………………….. 205,742,000 barrels
They have Offshore Drills that recently got raided by Nigerian guerrillas!

Chevron/Texaco………144,332,000 barrels

Exxon /Mobil……………130,082,000 barrels

Marathon/Speedway…117,740,000 barrels

Amoco……………………62,231,000 barrels

Citgo gas is from South America, from a Dictator who hates Americans. If you do the math at $30/barrel, these imports amount to over $18 BILLION! (oil is now $90 - $100 a barrel

Here are some large companies that do not import Middle Eastern oil:

Sunoco……………..0 barrels
- although what you are getting may NOT be Sunoco gas

Conoco……………..0 barrels

Sinclair……………..0 barrels

BP/Phillips…………0 barrels
BP owns a big Soviet Union Crude business TNK which is a critical contributor
Hess………………..0 barrels

ARC0………………0 barrels

Here in Jersey, there is also LukOil and that is Russian…

Be multi-dementional

• Leverage
• Control
• Concentration/Focused energy
• Persavereance
• Creativity
• Expansion
• Predictability

my logical and creative mind are both equally developed…

appreciate and be sensitive to your everchanging environment

think big to invent and leverage :

• invest in learning before doing
• rules laws & constraints
• re-engineer margins to SERVE you

I believe the best way to make money and sustain an income is to actively be a problem solver. This is an ongoing ambition I pursue and invest my energy…

If you keep focus and construct a momentum around your personal education in problem solving you will never be a deer-in-headlights when a problem arrives and during turbulent times, be the Jedi Master of the Force as seen in the eyes of those who are ill prepared.

nurture your “financial IQ”

Develop your methods of thinking… thats a daily discipline for problem solving… this goes for everything in life big and small IA… 

Donald Trump has a really good point in his book “The America we deserve” he speaks on the need for how many people need to change their feelings on pensions or regulated salaries and must forget their “entitlement” attitude…

It is my personal belief many government employed individuals have lost much of the American entrepreneurial spirit and sheepish “Group Think” has out of mediocrity grown to misconstrue entitlement for a position on the payroll…

remember “stay hungry” and if you fall into a comfort zone Snap-out-of-it! asap!
“dont become a Passive Observer” says The Donald !

Why we want you to be rich. by Donald Trump and Robert Kiyosaki is a book about how these two successful men think and how to improve your future…

I like this book because it is not a scam or scheme, but just a nice momentum of a story about how to think and plan… a great book on financial education.
Being asset rich and finance poor is not enough…

I next want to read “The America We Deserve”