I thought it would be fun to gin up a program that would create phoney ATM receipts. I figured it would be an educational experience as well a good for a few laughs with my buds. Feel free to have fun with it. Maybe print up one with a big balance to impress the ladies. Or even throw in a personal note to someone. Not useful for too much else but hey, that’s what the web is all about.

Here is the Phony ATM Receipt Generator.

When I’m looking for a cheap flight, usually the first place I check is either Orbitz.com or Expedia.com and then depending on whether I am going to a city that Southwest.com goes to, I check that as well. I had a recent trip planned that involved a non-refundable European leg on a small carrier that I hadn’t heard of. Perhaps out of instinct, I opted for the “travel insurance” on Expedia. Well, I got sick the day before that leg and had to cancel. I needed to get a doctors note and it took a few back and forth mailings but I was able to get the full refund from the insurer. Expedia saved me there.

Recently, I’ve begun using another travel aggregator site and was able to find some good flights to Europe using Kayak.com. It’s search is a touch slow but it entertains you while you wait, as you watch it rattle off all the airline sites it is checking for you. A good new entry into the space, Farecast.com probably does the best job of showing when the flights are cheapest should you be flexible in your travels. For information on particular travel locations, there are a number of social sites that solicit travelers stories but my favorite happens to be Yahoo Trip Planner. If you’re traveling to Europe, the best accommodation finder I’ve come across is Venere.com.

Priceline.com is an option if you want to play the blind bid game. I’ve been able to get good deals on hotels and car rentals there. In one particularly great deal I was able to get, I was bidding on a 4-star hotel in a popular area of Los Angeles. I was able to check the message boards on Betterbidding.com and find what lowball prices others had previously had success with in that neighborhood and used that as my bid.

If you’re planning a trip and the weather is important to your planning, Weather Underground provides the ability to check what the weather was like in recent years at that location on the dates your interested in. This was quite valuable for choosing a date and locale for a large outdoor party. Finally, everyone should be aware of seat maps available online on sites such as USA Today’s SeatInsider and SeatGuru.com to help you select the most comfortable seat on whatever airplane you have selected. Happy travels.

I’ve read a number of articles by the “Rich Dad, Poor Dad” author, Robert Kiyosaki, and am often amazed at the lack of insight I gain after reading the article….kind of like the lack of nutrition I feel after eating a bowl of Frosted Flakes.

In today’s Yahoo article by Kiyosaki Reading, Writing, and Resisting Debt, I gleaned that some debt is good debt with a hint toward that debt being real estate debt. Wow, that is deep.

I was beginning to wonder…was it just me? How is this guy so popular? Is everyone drinking the koolaid? I looked around the net at blogs, looked at some of the Amazon book reviews, etc. and found that I have a lot of company. Zac Bissonnette who, unlike me, took the time to read Rich Dad, Poor Dad, calls it “easily the worst of the 200-plus investing/personal finance books I’ve read”….Terrible books top this year’s personal finance best-sellers This real estate guru, John T. Reed, does an effective job barbecuing Kiyosaki. I encourage devotees to read John’s site and form their own opinions.

Neteller.com has been the primary conduit for Americans transferring funds from their banks to foreign online poker sites ever since credit card companies and PayPal stopped allowing such transfers. That will no longer be the case.

Yesterday, the two Canadian founders of Neteller, Stephen Lawrence, Neteller’s largest shareholder and former chief executive officer, and John Lefebvre, a former president of the company were arrested on American soil. Federal agents nabbed Lawrence in the US Virgin Islands and Lefebvre in Malibu, California. Lefebvre, somewhat of a modern-day hippie, has a MySpace page here.

Now today, Neteller announced they will no longer allow American customers to transfer funds in or out of online gambling sites. Neteller’s announcement can be found here.

This site has some suggestions for alternatives The Neteller Lowdown

Tax time is approaching and it’s always a chore to calculate capital gains for my taxes. I was looking around the web to see if any of the free stock ticker sites had a way that I could just submit a bunch of ticker symbols and dates and generate a table of historical stock prices. I mean, how difficult is that? Yahoo has a great web interface for aggregating current stock quotes and even tabulated historical data for one stock but no way to tabulate a groups of ticker symbols historical data. Big Charts (now owned by MarketWatch) has a clean interface for getting a single historical stock quote for a particular day but no tabulated historical quote data. Analyzerxl.com has a commercial tool that does this and a lot more but for now I don’t need more. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any such site to serve my needs. I thought about building a server-based tool to collect this information but I believe this would violate terms of usage. So instead, I made a simple tool that simply builds links to Big Charts’ historical price lookups. Note that if your stock has split in the time since you bought it until now, BigCharts will show you the “split-adjusted” price. Each link that is generated will launch a new window, or tab, to a Big Charts page for that stock and date.

Disclaimers:

• I am in no way affiliated with Big Charts or MarketWatch (an excellent news source by the way).
• I read the terms of use and I can’t see any violations with direct linking to their historical quote pages. If anyone can see such a violation, I will be happy to modify this page as necessary.
• Credit: Dustin Diaz’s site provided me a starting point for the functionality.

I just discovered that PayPal offers a very competitive money market rate. I discovered this in Tim Middleton’s article on MSN from 6/20/06 (rate information is 7 months old now but the article is still very informative) In this weird world, cash beats stocks. I immediately went to my PayPal account and found you have to provide an SSN and acknowledge reading the prospectus and your immediately making a very competitive 5.02% (as of 1/16/07) rate on your cash remaining in the PayPal account.

It started a number of years ago. A few buddies and I would go to Vegas on the cheap and enjoy the first weekend of college basketball’s glorious tournament. We’d set up shop at the Stardust sportsbook with a wall of TVs showing the first 48 games over the course of 4 days. It was heaven for us hoops junkies. We had to go back every year. Little by little, more friends would come and then friends of friends and then friends of friends of friends, well you get the idea. For those who’ve discovered Vegas for March Madness, you know what I’m talking about, it’s addictive…..its the ultimate sports watching, betting, boozing, laughing, male-bonding experience out there. You find yourself high-fiving total strangers during victories, yelling at the bad coaching, doing bad Dick Vitale impressions (”the kid’s a diaper dandy”), it’s like you’re all part of the same fraternity for one weekend.

Over the years, our accommodations have improved a bit from the early days of driving to the motorlodge at the Stardust to the current days of taking the Southwest flights in and staying at the Monte Carlo….but in the end it’s all about the shared experience. And from my experience, there is no game I have somehow developed an instinct for finding the bad pointspreads for than college basketball at tourney time. And when I do, I load up on the straight bets and ignore the sucker parlays and teasers. If you can’t beat the games straight, bet small and enjoy the games.
If you’re heading to Vegas this year, the first round schedule for 2007 is March 15, 16, 17, and 18th…maybe we’ll high-five during the day or cross paths on the way to the VIP room at night. And if you go by the venerable Stardust, take a good look at the old dog as it will be the last time since it will be imploded this year after serving us gamblers from 1958-2006. If you’re looking for rooms, check out vegasreservations.com or vegas.com.

Today’s USA Today has a good article on tax issues surrounding retirement….Retiring doesn’t mean retiring from taxes. It explains the wisdom to “stuff as much into a Roth IRA as you can”. So, if possible, it is wise to contribute the $4000 a year to a Roth ($5000 if you’re over 50). However, high wage earners aren’t allowed to contribute to a Roth (single filers earning over $95k in 2006 and couples earning over $160k). These individuals then should strongly consider the dreaded non-deductible IRA.

I can’t deduct my contribution to an IRA because I qualify for a 401K plan through my employer. And if my spouse and I exceed $160k in AGI (Adjusted Gross Income) this year precluding us from a Roth contribution, it now makes sense for us to put $4k into a non-deductible IRA. This is because, as the USA Today article states:

“A quirk in the tax law will let you convert your regular IRA to a Roth. You’ll have to pay taxes on your gains to make that conversion. But you can spread out those tax payments, making half in 2011 and the other half in 2012. For higher-income investors, it’s about the only opportunity to open a Roth.”

Suze Orman had a great article on Yahoo on this subject back in December in her article, An IRA Nest Egg You Can’t Pass Up. Seems like a really nice loophole to me.

Update: The Wall Street Journal does an excellent job explaining the 2010 IRA-to-Roth and all the associated issues.

I’m one of those persons that gets bugged when I read something that sounds definitive from a purported authority that is incorrect or incomplete. Today, I came across such a glaring omission in the about.com article Eight Ways to Avoid the 10% Early Withdrawal Fee on Your IRA . Now, it doesn’t say “The Eight Best Ways” or “The Only Eight Ways” but it is seriously lacking in mentioning the ninth way.

The “Ninth Way”, shall we call it, is well known by its IRS code the 72t Exception. There are websites devoted just to this exception. Googling “72t exception” gave me almost 14000 hits. It is an exception because it is a way to avoid the 10% penalty for early withdrawal (i.e. before age 59 1/2). The exception involves taking “substantially equal periodic payments” and is sometimes called a [SEPP] Plan. The payments must be taken at least annually — from the retirement plan for at least five years or until age 59½, whichever is longer. Once one begins taking these early payments, they must continue until they reach the age of 59 1/2. Further, they must be taken for a minimum of 5 years so a 57 year old would need to take them until age 62, while a 50 year old would be required to continue until 59 1/2. Fidelity has a good description here.

Following up my previous post on putting brokerage account cash into the money market, I just got off the phone with ETrade and I am not happy. And surely, those of you in a similar situation should not be happy either. Here’s the crux of it….

If you have a retirement account such as a Roth-IRA at ETrade and you maintain an amount of cash less than $25k, you will receive an annual return of 0.5% on that cash….that’s right 1/2 of 1%. The only way to currently receive a higher rate is to put it into a tax-free money market option such as JP Morgan Calif Municipal which has no minimum balance and pays 2.5%. Yes, you read that right…I was told that the best rate I can get in my non-taxable account is to put it into a tax-free money market mutual fund. Here is ETrade’s rate comparison for cash options. The agent I spoke with agreed that this is redundant and also said that the money market rates is one of the biggest complaints they get. I also told him that I was unable to purchase a money market fund through their mutual fund screener tool and he referred me to someone at the mutual fund desk. That person told me that “there aren’t any money market mutual funds available on ETrade that I am aware of”.

For their taxable accounts, they have a better answer. I was told that in addition to a reasonable choice of the tax-free money market, they do offer a good rate (he quoted 5.05%) in an ETrade Bank account which allows instant switching back and forth between the “bank account” and the non-retirement “brokerage account”.

Bottomline, if one keeps under $25k in a retirement account at ETrade, your best bet is to put it in a tax-free money market (the illogic of it kills me), buy a super-safe bond such as a soon-to-expire T-Bill (I opted for this), or move it to another broker such as Schwab (currently offering 4.85% with no minimum in its sweep account). As an added bonus, a T-Bill (as with Treasury notes and bonds) are free of state income tax.

Here Maxfunds.com discusses the sweep options at various brokers and gives a thumbs up to Schwab and Fidelity and a thumbs down to ETrade and TD Ameritrade.

E*TRADE now makes more from net interest income than they do from stock trading commissions…..

What E*TRADE doesn’t want new customers to do is choose a money market fund as their sweep balance, but if you select “view tax-free alternates” when asked to choose a sweep option, other higher-yield options appear.

The tax-free money market funds pay far more than the normal sweep options – and the interest is tax-free federally, and could be tax-free in states with the appropriate fund.