June 2007

Carnival of Wealth Building #6

June 22, 2007

The Carnival of Wealth Building # 6 was hosted at Home Equity Loan Lowdown. My article on How to Find the Hidden Costs of Mutual Funds was included in the carnival. Thanks, Lowdown! Here are three articles from other blogs that I that were interesting: Tips for Gaining and Impressing Potential Investors @ Small Business [...]

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Learn How to Invest–A Guide to Asset Allocation

June 22, 2007

As I began writing the How to Make the Most of Morningstar series, it occurred to me that one of the biggest reasons to use Morningstar for investing in mutual funds is to build a diversified investment portfolio through proper asset allocation. So to put into better perspective the tools at Morningstar, this series looks [...]

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Motivation and Money Tip # 8: Listen

June 21, 2007

Struggling financially can be a lonely business. Often times we don’t want to tell others about our financial turmoil. Even husbands and wives sometimes won’t talk to each other about a money problem, particularly if the other doesn’t know about the $500 that was charged to the Visa credit card. And eventually, we can convince [...]

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“Holy Balance Transfer Fee, Batman! That 0% Credit Card Cost Me 6%!”

June 21, 2007

I just hate misleading advertising, don’t you? The other day I received an offer for my AT&T Universal Card for a balance transfer at 0% interest until January 1, 2008. Zero percent credit card deals can be a great way to save money, which is the hallmark of smarter money management. But as always, I [...]

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Making the Most of Morningstar: Determining the Cost of Your Mutual Funds

June 20, 2007

The Morningstar User’s Guide is a series of articles discussing how to make the best use of the tools, research and analysis available at Morningstar.com. As we saw in the last article covering Morningstar’s Portfolio Manager, the tool provides some basic information about our investments, including the fund name, price, market value and the Morningstar [...]

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How to Find The Hidden Cost of Mutual Funds

June 19, 2007

I wish mutual fund companies actual sent us a bill each time they charged us. They don’t, of course, and so like The Dark Side of Placing Your Finances on Autopilot, we can easily forget about just how much they cost us. On top of that, not all costs of owning a mutual fund are [...]

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Nothing New Under The Sun

June 18, 2007

like reading older personal finance books that aren’t part of the current craze of “Get Rich Quickly” books that seemed to get published daily. That’s why I love used book stores, and last week I found this gem, Money Game, which was published in 1967. The author is George Goodman, who published the book under [...]

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Making the Most of Morningstar: Portfolio Manager

June 18, 2007

The Morningstar User’s Guide is a series of articles discussing how to make the best use of the tools, research and analysis available at Morningstar.com. In the last article we covered a basic Introduction to Morningstar.com. Today we look at adding our portfolio to Morningstar. After you register with Morningstar (which is free), adding your [...]

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What Will You Be Doing The Day Before The Market Crashes?

June 17, 2007

I was browsing through an antique store this past week and found some old bank checks. Let’s just say they don’t make checks like they use to. Here’s one written from a PepsiCo account: This reminds me of drinking Pepsi from a glass bottle (I know, I’m showing my age). But there was one check [...]

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