Tuesday, December 7, 2010

how to budget personal finances

Hapa is fast becoming the norm, the days of backlash are long over, at least in Cali, and certainly in the LBC where i am from. Though from our embarrassment of a museum, LBMofA, you would never know. The Paramount/Artesia/Long Beach area is known as the most integrated in the country, and swirl kids like mine and many others are very common from many different ethnic backgrounds and cultures. Mine is white and black, he dates a blonde Columbian. My adopted is black with an Irish grandpa and mexican/white girlfriend in medical school, though you would never know except by his last name. Know kids who are Samoan/black, Philipino/Mexican. Black/Mexican, Mexican/PuertoRican, Cambodian/Indian, white and everyone else, Philipino/white like my cousins daughter. And of course we have that mutt Obama guy.

Sports have done the most to integrate our country, from Korean/Black like a SuperBowl MVP, to more mixed kids at our Poly HS, the most NFL players of any in history at going on 60, like Marcedes Lewis at Jacksonville Jaguars little brother and sister when mom married a white guy, she used to babysit for me. Landry Fields, Pac Ten scholar athlete of the year at Stanford now a starter for the Knicks grew up with us and also a swirl like my boy. Lots of swirl kids like Jason Kidd, Tony Parker, Jordan Farmar, the Lopex twins are never given a second glance.

The arts are way behind in this, as few have kids from being too selfish , and not very open to true world culture anyway, it is completely white again. With a few token Asian girls thrown in. only the rich and foolish can afford the useless art degrees, other ethnicities have better sense. Also, if not for the number of head NFL coaches in rustbelt cities a few years ago, Obama never would ahve won. It took white racists to see hardworking, responsible, intelligent black men to get over their prejudices. Pittsburgh, Indianapolis, Chicago, Cincinnati, Kansas City, and more have help slowly open the land to diversity, far more than the arts.

Its time to get back to early modernism, where all cultures had something to add, instead of the academic white bread nutritionless lily whiteness of today. Where did it go wrong? The Academies were resurrected from their deserved grave, time to storm the Bastilles of art, and free it for us all.

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Automate Your Finances to Spend Less Time Managing Your Accounts

Despite how simple the process can be, most of us are terrible at saving and paying bills. Here's a strategy to effectively automate most of your finances to keep you saving and out of late fee trouble.

Ramit Sethi of I Will Teach You To Be Rich.com has put together a system for managing your personal finances that only takes about an hour of your time each week. The video above fully explains the process in detail, but here's the gist. First, you want to set up your bills and other payments so they're all happening on the day you get your first paycheck of the month (the first of the month for most people). Once you have that in place, you want to set up automatic savings plans (Sethi suggests using Ing Direct) with sub-savings accounts that let you organize your savings into specific categories (vacation, wedding, etc.). You'll also want to send a percentage of your paycheck to your 401k, and have all of this happen immediately so that the money you see when you get paid is the money left when everything has already been saved. From there, you automatically pay as many bills as you can with your credit card (and then pay the credit card bill on pay day). For the bills you can't pay with your credit card (like rent, in most cases), you can use your online banking to automatically issue a check. This will leave a little money leftover in your checking account that you can use to budget for guilt-free spending and cash withdrawals.

As someone who's often fallen victim to the faults of automatic payments systems (despite frequently using them), definitely do not forget to stay on top of your bills nonetheless. Make sure you set some time aside at least once a month to do a little maintenance and make sure there are no bugs causing your automated finance system to break down. Sethi isn't suggesting a set-it-and-forget-it automated finance system by any means, but as someone who hates paying bills I know how easy it can be to procrastinate and ignore the task. If you set up a good automated system like this one, you'll be at a point where all you have to do is watch and fix the occasional problem as the most important things are being taken care of for you.

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Google's New Smartphone is Not the Big News (GOOG, BBY, AAPL, RIMM ...

It's probably an overstatement to say that we have now gotten our first look at the long-awaited Nexus S smartphone from Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG). The new phone, introduced a mobile device conference in San Francisco, uses version 2.3 ...

Hulu plans its own entertainment news show, but will anyone watch?

As Peter Kafka at MediaMemo reports, Hulu is currently casting for a presenter for the show which will be published daily, taking a 'Daily Show'-style satirical approach to the latest entertainment news. Hulu (backed by US TV giants NBC ...

Small Business News: The Small Business Samba

From the slow dance Republicans and Democrats have been doing in Washington the last few weeks over tax cuts and jobless benefit extensions approved earlier.

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Google's New Smartphone is Not the Big News (GOOG, BBY, AAPL, RIMM ...

Hulu plans its own entertainment news show, but will anyone watch?

Small Business News: The Small Business Samba

From the slow dance Republicans and Democrats have been doing in Washington the last few weeks over tax cuts and jobless benefit extensions approved earlier.

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Google's New Smartphone is Not the Big News (GOOG, BBY, AAPL, RIMM ...

Hulu plans its own entertainment news show, but will anyone watch?

Small Business News: The Small Business Samba

From the slow dance Republicans and Democrats have been doing in Washington the last few weeks over tax cuts and jobless benefit extensions approved earlier.

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Google's New Smartphone is Not the Big News (GOOG, BBY, AAPL, RIMM ...

Hulu plans its own entertainment news show, but will anyone watch?

Small Business News: The Small Business Samba

From the slow dance Republicans and Democrats have been doing in Washington the last few weeks over tax cuts and jobless benefit extensions approved earlier.

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Google's New Smartphone is Not the Big News (GOOG, BBY, AAPL, RIMM ...

Hulu plans its own entertainment news show, but will anyone watch?

Small Business News: The Small Business Samba

From the slow dance Republicans and Democrats have been doing in Washington the last few weeks over tax cuts and jobless benefit extensions approved earlier.

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Automate Your Finances to Spend Less Time Managing Your Accounts

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Google's New Smartphone is Not the Big News (GOOG, BBY, AAPL, RIMM ...

Hulu plans its own entertainment news show, but will anyone watch?

Small Business News: The Small Business Samba

From the slow dance Republicans and Democrats have been doing in Washington the last few weeks over tax cuts and jobless benefit extensions approved earlier.

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Google's New Smartphone is Not the Big News (GOOG, BBY, AAPL, RIMM ...

Hulu plans its own entertainment news show, but will anyone watch?

Small Business News: The Small Business Samba

From the slow dance Republicans and Democrats have been doing in Washington the last few weeks over tax cuts and jobless benefit extensions approved earlier.

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Google's New Smartphone is Not the Big News (GOOG, BBY, AAPL, RIMM ...

Hulu plans its own entertainment news show, but will anyone watch?

Small Business News: The Small Business Samba

From the slow dance Republicans and Democrats have been doing in Washington the last few weeks over tax cuts and jobless benefit extensions approved earlier.

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Google's New Smartphone is Not the Big News (GOOG, BBY, AAPL, RIMM ...

Hulu plans its own entertainment news show, but will anyone watch?

Small Business News: The Small Business Samba

From the slow dance Republicans and Democrats have been doing in Washington the last few weeks over tax cuts and jobless benefit extensions approved earlier.

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Google's New Smartphone is Not the Big News (GOOG, BBY, AAPL, RIMM ...

Hulu plans its own entertainment news show, but will anyone watch?

Small Business News: The Small Business Samba

From the slow dance Republicans and Democrats have been doing in Washington the last few weeks over tax cuts and jobless benefit extensions approved earlier.

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Google's New Smartphone is Not the Big News (GOOG, BBY, AAPL, RIMM ...

Hulu plans its own entertainment news show, but will anyone watch?

Small Business News: The Small Business Samba

From the slow dance Republicans and Democrats have been doing in Washington the last few weeks over tax cuts and jobless benefit extensions approved earlier.

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Automate Your Finances to Spend Less Time Managing Your Accounts

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Google's New Smartphone is Not the Big News (GOOG, BBY, AAPL, RIMM ...

Hulu plans its own entertainment news show, but will anyone watch?

Small Business News: The Small Business Samba

From the slow dance Republicans and Democrats have been doing in Washington the last few weeks over tax cuts and jobless benefit extensions approved earlier.

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Google's New Smartphone is Not the Big News (GOOG, BBY, AAPL, RIMM ...

Hulu plans its own entertainment news show, but will anyone watch?

Small Business News: The Small Business Samba

From the slow dance Republicans and Democrats have been doing in Washington the last few weeks over tax cuts and jobless benefit extensions approved earlier.

bench craft company rip off blog

Google's New Smartphone is Not the Big News (GOOG, BBY, AAPL, RIMM ...

Hulu plans its own entertainment news show, but will anyone watch?

Small Business News: The Small Business Samba

From the slow dance Republicans and Democrats have been doing in Washington the last few weeks over tax cuts and jobless benefit extensions approved earlier.

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Monday, December 6, 2010

People Making Money Net

Matt Miller:

Oooh, you're so strong, baby, so handsome. You're the greatest.

I'm talking about you, America. You're . . . why, you're exceptional!

Does anyone else think there's something a little insecure about a country that requires its politicians to constantly declare how exceptional it is? A populace in need of this much reassurance may be the surest sign of looming national decline.

American exceptionalism is now the central theme of Sarah Palin's speeches. The supposedly insufficient Democratic commitment to this idea will be a core Republican complaint in 2012. Conservatives assail Barack Obama for his alleged indifference to it. It's part of their broader indictment of Obama's fishy cosmopolitanism, his overseas "apology tours," his didn't-wear-the-flag-lapel-pin-until-he-had-to peevishness. Not to mention the whole anti-colonial Kenyan resentment thing the president's got going.

Real men - real Americans - know America is the greatest country ever invented. And they shout it from the rooftops. Don't they?

Gail Collins:

Senator Lisa Murkowski has just claimed a historic write-in victory against Joe Miller, the Tea Party champion who beat her in the Republican primary. The first thing you will want to know is that this will make Sarah Palin miserable.

Nicholas Kristof:

But there is also a larger question: What kind of a country do we aspire to be? Would we really want to be the kind of plutocracy where the richest 1 percent possesses more net worth than the bottom 90 percent?

Oops! That’s already us. That’s already us. The top 1 percent of Americans owns 34 percent of America’s private net worth, according to figures compiled by the Economic Policy Institute in Washington. The bottom 90 percent owns just 29 percent.

That also means that the top 10 percent control more than 70 percent of Americans’ total net worth.

David Ignatius:

The tycoons can relax. Two White House economic officials told me this week that fixing the carried-interest loophole is probably dead, for this Congress and the next. It was hard enough to beat the big guys. But once they successfully hid under the cover of the little guys, it was impossible.

That political legerdemain is making America more unequal every year, and the polls show people are mad as hell at Wall Street and Washington, both. And yet the popular chorus continues: Save the tax breaks for the rich.

Los Angeles Times:

Washington is poised to stop providing extended unemployment benefits despite the huge number of laid-off workers, the paucity of job openings, the high rate of underemployment in every sector of the economy and stubbornly slow economic growth. That's because Republicans in the Senate insist that, unlike the hefty tax cuts they covet for the wealthy, the comparatively slender subsidies for the unemployed must not be financed with borrowed money. This penuriousness is not just hypocritical, it's bad economics.

New York Times:

The world’s nuclear wannabes, starting with Iran, should send a thank you note to Senator Jon Kyl. After months of negotiations with the White House, he has decided to try to block the lame-duck Senate from ratifying the New Start arms control treaty.

The treaty is so central to this country’s national security, and the objections from Mr. Kyl — and apparently the whole Republican leadership — are so absurd that the only explanation is their limitless desire to deny President Obama any legislative success.

The Republicans like to claim that they are the party of national security. We can only hope that other senators in the party will decide that the nation’s security interests must trump political maneuvering.

Yeah, that'll happen.

David Broder:

When the rules of the House of Representatives forced the Democrats to confront a painful choice among their leaders, they did what Democrats are often inclined to do. They changed the rules.

Usually, such a stunt would matter only to the members affected by the change. But this one sends a dangerous signal at a crucial moment, when both parties are being tested on their willingness to respond to the lessons of the last election.

Uh huh. What's really keeping Americans up at night is the internal House procedures of selecting the minority whip and the creation of the position of assistant leader and zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz... Oh, and he's also bitter that Nancy Pelosi dared to run for House Minority Leader -- and win.

Meanwhile, Dana Milbank claims that Pelosi's victory on Wednesday is actually proof of how unpopular she is. Then he quotes some sore loser Blue Dogs to prove he's right.

Karl Rove does his usual shtick about why Obama sucks and Reagan was the bestest, most awesomest president ever!

Alan Simpson is feeling a little besieged these days. It seems people aren't taking too kindly to his proposals to cut a chunk out of their Social Security benefits, and they're saying so.

But Simpson said that while every interest group that testified before his committee agreed that the mounting federal debt is a national tragedy, they would then talk about why government funding to their area of interest shouldn't be touched.

"We had the greatest generation -- I think this is the greediest generation," he said.

All this hubbub isn't a surprise to Simpson, given how politically polarized the country is these days.

"You don't want to listen to the right and the left -- the extremes," he said. "You don't want to listen to Keith Olbermann and Rush Babe and Rachel Minnow or whatever that is, and Glenn Beck. They're entertainers. They couldn't govern their way out of a paper sack -- from the right or the left. But they get paid a lot of money from you and advertisers -- thirty, fifty million a year -- to work you over and get you juiced up with emotion, fear, guilt, and racism. Emotion, fear, guilt, and racism.

"Time to go for facts. Everybody's entitled to their own opinion, but nobody's entitled to their own facts," Simpson said, paraphrasing former U.S. Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan.

Oh, how right he is. Facts are important. One really important fact that seems to be overlooked in his crusade against Social Security is this one: Social Security isn't contributing to the national debt or deficit. Yet he insists on making it part of the discussion.

Here's another fact: Simpson, at age 79, received his Social Security benefits right on schedule at age 65. He also received his government pension at age 65. Both of those were financed by contributions the Baby Boomer generation made through their work which boosted the economy. Without our contributions, his generation wouldn't have enjoyed their retirement years in relatively good health with a decent financial safety net.

More facts: People Simpson's age working in the private sector were more likely to be covered by a pension plan in their early working years and later by 401(k) plans. They were also more likely to remain with one employer for a longer period of time, allowing them to accumulate a decent pension before they reached age 65. All of that was done on the taxpayers' dime. Pension contributions are deductible by corporations; 401k contributions in the early years were exempt from ALL taxes (later that changed to exemption from income tax only), and funds are accumulated on a tax-free basis.

In plain terms, the Greatest Generation's comfortable retirement has been bought and paid for by those members of the generation Simpson describes as "selfish", and his generation enjoys a far more comfortable retirement than we can expect to receive.

Meanwhile, that so-called "selfish" generation is the one now most likely to have lost significant portions of their 401(k) savings to the market crash, lost their homes or a large portion of their home's value, lost their jobs and are not likely to be employed any time soon. When employers have the option to hire younger, less experienced workers who will work for less money and cost less in benefit dollars, they exercise it, leaving older workers (and particularly women) out in the cold.

Selfishness is as selfishness does, Mr. Simpson. We've paid for you without complaint. Now it's time to step up and really identify who is selfish. Start with the companies listed on the Dow Jones index and work from there.

Tuesday, December 7, 2010

Automate Your Finances to Spend Less Time Managing Your Accounts

Automate Your Finances to Spend Less Time Managing Your Accounts

Automate Your Finances to Spend Less Time Managing Your Accounts

Monday, December 6, 2010

Wednesday, December 1, 2010

How to Manage Your Money

Mint

Thrive

Texthog

Venmo

Owe Me Cash

Conclusion

Automate Your Finances to Spend Less Time Managing Your Accounts