The final payments on my last Prosper.com notes have finally come in, and the total value of the notes I’ve invested in is now $0.00. And it’s going to stay that way. This isn’t Prosper’s fault. It’s mine. I’ll explain. I started investing in Prosper.com notes in June of 2006, as an experiment. This was … Read more
J Money is one of the liveliest personal finance writers I know, and an awfully hard worker. In between this and his other blogs, he’s got LoveDrop.org going on, a new idea in paying it forward to individuals who’ve come upon hard times. Ahh … to have a third of his energy and a tenth … Read more
This guest post is brought to you courtesy of Leon Harris. He writes for Financialized, an investing and finance blog that offers an unbiased perspective on personal finance topics. Everyone knows that a 401K is set up almost exclusively as a retirement plan, and as such, it comes with some pretty hefty penalties for early … Read more
A new user over at the Money StackExchange site asked a question about a particular portfolio: Is the Yale Portfolio by David Swenson too conservative for a twenty-something with a mid-sized portfolio … ? He asks if the portfolio is “too conservative.” He’s been told (as we all have been, probably) that his investment allocation … Read more
It’s a little embarrassing that I’ve seen so many advertisements and blogs for things related to “forex” and I never bothered to look up what the heck that meant. Thankfully, it turned out that I had heard of what it means, just not by that word. “Forex” is an abbreviation for the (huge) foreign exchange … Read more
If keeping your day job is the cake, then investing in yourself outside of your day job is at least the icing, or maybe even another four or five cakes’ worth. But if that sounds like way too much work, there’s always the chance you can hit the jackpot by suing the entity that consumed … Read more
A few months back I received a complimentary review copy of Mariusz Skonieczny’s Why Are We So Clueless about the Stock Market? which claims to help you “[l]earn how to invest your money, how to pick stocks, and how to make money in the stock market. This book was a very easy, quick read, and … Read more
The author’s marketing firm was kind enough to send me a complimentary copy of Mark Gilbert’s new book called Complicit: How Greed and Collusion Made the Credit Crisis Unstoppable. I enjoyed the book. It was well-written. (Mr. Gilbert has written a regular column for Bloomberg News for over a decade.) What this book brings to … Read more