Done To Zen

PT Money shares what some of his readers are saving money for. Made me think about what short-term goals I have. For the rest of 2008, I would say I’m saving money for my 401K and Roth IRA.

Can I Get Rich on a Salary (among others) posts advice from the richest person alive on how to become rich. Simple, common-sense advice (but then again, I wouldn’t have expected anything else).

The Simple Dollar talks about how to find your least important bill and seeing if you can’t perhaps eliminate it even if you can afford it. Going through his exercise, I figured out that my least important bill is gym membership. And, yes, I can live without it, and, yes, I cancelled it, just an hour before reading the article, in fact. :-)

Millionaire Mommy Next Door says it’s entirely possible to get FDIC insurance for your money even if you have more than $100K.

Quest for a Million is finding it hard to not touch his portfolio. I don’t have the urge to do something about my portfolio, but it still sucks big time when every contribution I make to my 401K disappears by the time I make the next contribution. But I just keep reminding myself I’m buying shares at a low price, which is a good thing. Hopefully, I can look back in ten years and laugh about it.

Blueprint for Financial Prosperity has a nice table on projected income tax brackets for 2009.

Bespoke Investment Group talks about how the current yield for three-month treasuries is an unbelievable $4 per year for $10,000 in investment. This certainly sucks and is one of the reasons I haven’t purchased any treasuries yet despite finally getting my account fully authorized.

New York Times reports that a shareholder at the now-defunct Lehman Brothers lost $6 million in just one night. Yikes. My paltry losses don’t seem so bad anymore.

MoneyNing shares the story of a coworker who apparently can’t afford her house but spends around $1320 every month on unnecessary things. The most interesting part of the post was how much people spend on utilities. $600 for electricity bill??? I freaked out when I got a $70 bill (my house isn’t a mansion, but it isn’t a matchbox, either). He says his last electricity bill was $13.01. My last bill was $21.60.

Charles over at The Kirk Report thinks that bailouts are band-aids, and I couldn’t agree more. The more I think about it, the more I feel that the government should just step back and let the market crash and work itself back up the right way.

DashOver shows us the stock market graveyard. It hurts my head just to look at the charts. Are any of them good investments to make, now that they are trading south of embarrassing?

An article from Slate on Merrill Lynch avoided the fate of Lehman Brothers compares the two CEOs and how one of them played his cards right and the other took the company to the cleaners.