December 2007

SEP-IRA and 401K–Can you contribute to both?

December 17, 2007

If you have self-employed income in addition to your regular job, can you contribute to a SEP IRA even if you have a 401k at work? This question has hit home for me this year because I’ll have income from this website. While I’ve decided that the income is not enough to warrant opening an [...]

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Freddie Mac Uses YouTube to Warn of Foreclosure Scams

December 16, 2007

Freddie Mac has posted a video on YouTube to warn of foreclosure scams. It’s a 2 minute video that describes certain foreclosure scams that have surfaced in the wake of the sub-mortgage debacle. Here’s the video:   [Youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cS2HsaBA5No&autoload=1] 

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How I beat the S&P 500 five years running and why you should (and should not) be impressed

December 14, 2007

I have not only beat the S&P 500 the last five years, I’ve clobbered the S&P 500. The S&P 500 has returned about 14% annually since 2003. While working on some posts about my investments for The Dough Roller, I set about calculating my returns for the past five years. I even had to order [...]

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Four Incredibly Useful Financial Calculations You Can Do In Your Head

December 13, 2007

I came across four useful financial calculations that you can perform in your head and thought I’d pass them along. Here they are: What am I giving up in retirement savings when I spend money today? This is an easy one–add a zero to the price tag. Assuming you have 30 years to retirement and [...]

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Roth and Traditional 401(k): Why not invest in both?

December 11, 2007

The question of whether to invest in a Roth or traditional has come up a lot lately. Yesterday I wrote about these retirement accounts in the The Ultimate Guide to Traditional and Roth 401(k) and IRA Retirement Accounts. In that article I linked to a Roth 401(k) calculator that can help you determine what’s best [...]

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Babycenter.com: A Nifty Tool to Calculate the Cost of Raising a Child

December 11, 2007

Children are expensive. At least that’s the conclusion I reached after running some numbers through the Child Cost Calculator at Babycenter.com. You’ll find the calculator under the tools menu item. With two teenagers running around our home, we already knew how expensive raising kids can be. But seeing that six digit number on the computer [...]

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The Ultimate Guide to Roth and Traditional 401(k) and IRA Retirement Accounts

December 10, 2007

When it comes to boosting your retirement accounts, the IRS has sent us help in the form of tax advantaged accounts like a 401(k) and an IRA. If we don’t take full advantage of these money making tools, we are turning away help when we need it the most. In this article, I will describe [...]

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PriceAmbush.com: Does it ambush the price or you?

December 7, 2007

A reader recently brought a website to my attention and asked what I thought of it as a money management tool. The site is called PriceAmbush, and it purports to allow you to search the Internet for the best deals on stuff. But I have very mixed feelings about this site. First, it appears to [...]

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SAFETY ALERT: Are your children playing with deadly toys (HealthyToys.org)

December 6, 2007

Yesterday I came across a website that identifies unhealthy toys and thought I’d pass it along. HealthyToys is a project of the Ecology Center, a nonprofit environmental organization based in Ann Arbor, Michigan. HealthyToys allows you to search for toys by name, brand or type. You can also see a list of the best and [...]

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