My Pocket Change

One of my goals for the week was to get pre-qualified (pre-approved, pre-authorized) for a mortgage. I’ve read this is the bargaining chip you use to get realtors to take you seriously. Following the review and advise of my friend Jim, I decided to give Lending Tree a shot. When he used Lending Tree a few years back, he got a friendly phone call within hours and numerous hours soon to follow. Unfortunately, I cannot say the same happened for me. Yet I know I have excellent credit, plenty of income, and a reasonable down payment. So what happened? Continue Reading »

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I went and checked out some open houses this last Sunday to try to get some perspective on the Baltimore housing market. I explored my current neighborhood — a place called Locust Point (where Fort McHenry is… you know, War of 1812… France Scott Key… Star Spangled Banner??? No? Well, me neither before I moved here!). Anyway, like much of the country, Baltimore’s housing jumped leaps and bounds over the last five years. Some of that is correcting itself as prices drop and inventory increases. Here’s an example of a place where the owner is getting caught in the cross fire. Continue Reading »

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If you thought the Fed rate cuts were all good news, think again. I received an email today that HSBC would be dropping their online savings account rate to 3.8% APY.  To be honest, I don’t know what it was before (I don’t use that account much), but I also noticed my Emigrant Direct account dropped also.  It looks like rates dropped from 4.7% APY to 4.3% APY.  Don’t get me wrong — if this saves the US economy and makes buying a house more affordable for me, I’m all for it! But we should appreciate that the economy is a very complex system, and Fed rate drops will have some unexpected and undesirable impacts (the biggest of which is the possibility of high inflation).  Fingers crossed!

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As I mentioned a few posts ago, one of my “goals” of 2008 is to seriously consider and explore buying a house. This doesn’t necessarily mean purchase a place, though that would be ideal. There are a lot of reasons why I think buying soon would be good, but there are other reasons why I think it’s not good. Here I’ll talk about my “pre-buy” plan of attack — research-oriented steps that should set me up right for eventually buying a home. Continue Reading »

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In a roller coaster week on the stock market, the market rebound was centered about Tuesday’s announcement that Federal Reserve would cut key interest rates by 3/4 a point. Unless you live under a rock, you know this. What you might not know is what those different rates really mean and their history. Continue Reading »

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Being financially organized is critical to being financially responsible. In order to improve you financial situation, you must first have a good understanding and perspective on it. That’s exactly what organizing gets you. As humans, we live in the present. For example, we consciously understand that a $7 lunch at Chipotle won’t break the bank, but what we might not appreciate is that doing that 5 days a week ends up costing around $150 a month. Financial organization would give us that perspective.

I see three critical pieces to the financial organization puzzle: net worth, budgeting, and retirement planning (not necessarily in that order). Here, I’ll talk about how I plan on tracking my net worth.

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I guess I don’t really need to write an “I’m back!” post since I never wrote an “I’m going away for a while post,” but it should be pretty obvious by the post dates that I haven’t exactly been maintaining my blog for the last ~8 months. Continue Reading »

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