My wife was online helping me to find a replacement cell phone. My contract expired long ago and the phone is starting to show signs that it won’t last much longer. She took a detour when she noticed that our bill was higher than it usually was, and investigated why. It was about $13 difference, … Read more
I was forwarded an article about a local woman whose bank, Bank of America, foreclosed on the house she and her family lived in only three months after her husband drowned in the river adjoining the property. Meanwhile, in other parts of Bank of America, foreclosures are being halted all over the country to make … Read more
Our county had our annual Fall Festival today. After trying in futility to corral all kinds of parade traffic, and after doing some hearing tests for the Lions Club, I went around to the vendors inside. I ran across someone I had done some website work for before. It speaks to my lack of self-confidence … Read more
In the town where I grew up, the fire department had to respond to calls. The reason I remember this is because our middle school had a fire drill and the fire department showed up. It turned out that someone forgot to call them with the drill schedule, and even though someone from the school … Read more
Chief Family Officer and I go waaaay back: we both started blogging in 2005. She, being the consummate CFO, has been far more regular with monitoring her routines than I have. (By contrast, if you were to count the number of times I start something up on here, and then never hear about it again, … Read more
A colleague at work was twisting my arm to get an Xbox 360 so that I could “play with all the cool kids” and get my butt handed to me in the new Halo game. This was after telling him that I already had a Wii. As a parting shot — he knows I write … 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
I didn’t do a huge amount of financial due diligence when I was dating my wife and after I became engaged to her. At most, I had a warm fuzzy feeling that she wasn’t too badly in debt and that she could cover (barely, perhaps) her bills with her job. The finances didn’t concern me … Read more