My Blog, Your Money

Wow!  I just heard the amazing story of little Charlie Simpson from England.  The 7-year old wanted to raise £500 for Haiti with a sponsored bike ride around a park and actually ended up raising £156,000!  Raising such a staggering amount of money is incredible and he’s a huge inspiration to us all.  To visit his donation page, click here.

Watch a video interview (when he was up to £30,000) with Charlie below.  Here’s a more up-to-date video.

Update 2/1/2010: The total is now over £195,000!

It used to be that with every new year, I’d look forward to the January Effect where the stock market would rally.  However, in recent years, this has not been the case.  In fact, 6 of the past 10 Januaries have seen declines.  Furthermore, the average change in January from 2000 to 2009 for every index is negative with the Dow at -2.16%, Nasdaq at -0.82%, and the S&P 500 at -1.50%.

With the recent market declines, this month is not looking much better.  Whether this January ends up or down, I’m still confident that the market will continue its recovery and will reach its peak levels again.  And I’m not the only one.

The tax deadline may be in April, but it’s always good to get an early start.  If that’s you, here are some new tax items to be aware of when going through your returns.  Looking ahead, here’s a great article about 10 Astute Tax Moves in 2010.

If you frequently use a debit card, watch out for skimming scams.  Skimming thieves use hidden equipment to capture your account information and the problem is increasing as debit card use rises.  Here are 3 actions you can take to protect yourself:

1.       Don’t type in your PIN when getting gas at the pump.

2.       Only use Bank ATMs

3.       Monitor your accounts

For more information, read this article: Debit-Card ‘Skimming’ Scams.

With the start of the new year, have you made any resolutions?  If you did, how are you doing on those?

If improving your credit is one of them, I suggest getting your credit report from annualcreditreport.com and then learning more about managing your credit at Credit Fairy.  There’s even some quizzes you can take at the latter.

I did pretty well on the Credit Myths Quiz only missing one, but I have to bone to pick on that one.  The third question states “Paying cash for every purchase hurts your credit.”  I said False, but the “correct” answer is True.  I still stand by my answer though because while paying cash doesn’t help with credit, I think the effect is actually none instead of negative.  So if you miss that one too, I don’t think you need to worry.  The Credit Literacy Quiz on the other hand is a whole ‘nother animal.

Happy New Year!  I hope everyone had a good time ringing in 2010.

Today also marks the 2^nd anniversary of this blog.  I totally forgot last year about this milestone, but was determined not to this year.  Mission accomplished.  Thanks to everyone out there for reading these past 2 years!  I appreciate all of your support.

Happy New Year’s Eve!

The Aughts has been an interesting decade.  We experienced the peak of the dot-com boom and the subsequent bust, the September 11 terrorist acts, wars in the Middle East, hurricanes and earthquakes, the rise of social networking, the election of the first multiracial president of the United States, and the worst recession since the Great Depression.

With that said, here’s looking to a new year and a new decade.

For those who celebrate, Merry Christmas everyone!

Here’s another indicator related to the holiday: the Boston Snow Indicator.  This is where a white Christmas in Boston predicts an up market the following year.  There isn’t strong evidence for this, but given the blizzards in Boston, I’m hopeful.  The market has recovered a lot of lost ground this year, but it still has a long way to go to get back to summer 2008 levels.

Here’s another investing tactic: Tax Selling.  If this is new to you, the concept is very simple.  All it is is selling the stocks you’re losing money on to reduce your capital gains for the year.  This in turn reduces tax liability.  This is usually done at the end of the year when a stock is unlikely to make any significant gains before the end of the year.  Come December 31, I know I’m probably going to sell some of my losers.

One has to be careful though.  When selling stocks for a loss, you must wait 30 days before you can repurchase the shares.  This is known as the wash-sale rule.

It’s almost the end of the year again and you know what that means!  It’s time for some window dressing – not the kind that you put in windows, but the practice where investment managers divest their portfolios of poor performers and load up on high-flying stocks in an attempt to appear more capable than they actually are when reporting their holdings.  Just one of the tricks of the trade to be aware of.