when do i get a bail out?

Here is the latest of government bail out for the auto industry.
http://www.cars.gov/ Car Allowance Rebate System, where people can get trade-in value of $3500 or $4500 for a new car (leased or purchase) when they junk a old fuel inefficient car.

My Honda Accord is now 15yrs old. I figure is finally my chance to get some government bailout money. Turns out, my car is too efficient, I don't qualify. Yet Again.

I should be happy. I have a job, good mortgage, made conservative investment choices, bought a fuel efficient car. However, every time there is a bailout and i don't qualify because I haven't demonstrate sufficient need, it just makes me mad. Oh well... this is why we have a "progressive democracy". We take money from people who have it now and people who will have it in the future to help people who need it now.

This makes me think.. how am I going to treat my children financially?
Am I going to be fair and treat them the same way? Or am I going to be equitable and treat them different depending on the level of need?

must read.. why education matters more than ever.

Education and technology: Supply, demand, and income inequality

street zip lookup

Here is an useful service that I discovered today. http://www.melissadata.com/lookups/zipstreet.asp
The service retrieves the list of streets and street addresses for a given zip code.

So how is this useful? When new vendors or clients gives me incomplete or unreadable addresses, or I didn't catch the complete address over the cellphone / answering machine. It's usually pretty easy to get zip code, but the street name might be misspelled. I can verify mailing address via www.usps.com. The problem is when the address look up fails, I had no way to browse similar addresses to see which one might be a match. With this service, it's easy to browse through a list of valid street names for the zip code.

529 college saving accounts

I have been meaning to research and open a 529 college saving account for the last 3 years. I'm finally going to get serious. I suppose I "lucked out" because I bypassed the big stock drop last year.

My plan is invest as much as possible as early as possible. The tax benefit of Ruth IRA and 529 account is exactly the same. I'm going to redirect my Ruth IRA contribution to the 529 account. Then switch back once I have a decent 529 balance.

Now the only question is which fund family / state plan do I want to invest. If you have a 529 account, would you share with me what you like about your particular plan?

visual guide to the financial crisis

Wonder how the financial crisis got to our current sad sad state? Wonder no more! Here is a visual "flow chart" that walk-through and summarize the events.

http://flowingdata.com/2008/11/25/visual-guide-to-the-financial-crisis/

In short.. Never under estimate the power of "GREED". History has show over and over again, as long as here is human capacity for greed, we'll continue to have financial bubble that leads to a major crisis.

cheap vs frugal

It's has been on my to do list to write a blog entry on this topic for a long time. Happily to report that one of my favorite blogger has written just such topic.

http://www.iwillteachyoutoberich.com/blog/stop-being-cheap-and-go-buy-something-valuable-today

If you haven't visited www.iwillteachyoutoberich.com, I highly recommended it.

think you had a bad day?!

check out the pictures from this blog.
http://brokershandsontheirfacesblog.tumblr.com/