Several people have asked why I like Series I savings bonds, so I thought I’d address that with a dedicated post…
For context, the Treasury has recently announced that they’re (mostly) getting rid of paper savings bonds, which effectively cuts the annual purchase limit in half (from $5k paper + $5k electronic to just $5k electronic). [...]

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The tenets of a sound investment philosophy are well established. Good investors seek quality equities that are undervalued, but offer strong upsides. In so doing, they often disregard conventional wisdom, boldly going where others fear to tread. At payoff time, they’re glad they followed the road less traveled.
I was thinking these thoughts on a recent [...]

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Last week I mentioned that paper savings bonds (both Series I and EE bonds) are going away at the end of 2011. To be honest, the lack of paper doesn’t really bother me – I’m fine with using TreasuryDirect – my concern is that this effectively cuts the purchase limit in half.
There has been a [...]

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It’s no secret that I’m a big (huge!) fan of keeping close track of our finances. In fact, I’ve been tracking and balancing our accounts in Quicken (and now Moneydance) since January 1st, 1997. The end result of my efforts has been the production of a relatively massive database containing our detailed financial history.
Today I [...]

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Last night while noodling around on the web, I ran across a press release from the Treasury stating that they will stop over-the-counter sales of paper U.S. Savings Bonds at the end of the year. In other words, you’ll no longer be able to stroll into your bank and load up on Series I or [...]

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I recently met with new clients who happen to be religious people. The couple is very nice. In fact, they are wonderful people. But they struggle financially. Why? Do they have lousy jobs? Nope. They are great earners. Are they big spenders. Not really. They live very frugally except for the one item – a [...]

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It’s time for another credit card signup bonus… This time around, it’s from the Chase Freedom card. In short, if you apply for the card and spend $500 within the first three months, you’ll get 10k bonus points that can be redeemed for a $100 check.
This card, which has no annual fee, also offers a [...]

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On Monday I talked about my experiences moving from Quicken to iBank. In short, iBank is a solid option, but it’s not right for me. I’m a bit of a power user when it comes to tracking investments, and the reporting features (and lack of a true portfolio view) were deal killers for me.
So… I [...]

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Not everyone can claim to be financially savvy. But many of us do try to sidestep chump status when it comes to consumer spending. That only makes sense. We want to keep more of our cash. But beyond that, we want to avoid being a sucker for every fast-talking pitchman coming down the pike.
I maintain [...]

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Over the weekend I spent some time migrating my 14+ years of Quicken data from Quicken 2007 to iBank, which was at the top of my list of Quicken alternatives. I’ll be providing lots of details below, but the executive summary is that iBank (currently version 4.2.4) is a great piece of software, though I’m [...]

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