So what am I doing?  I’m following the CEO’s move and buying more.  While he put around $10 million into his company, I think I’m going to go a little lighter than that.  I am however going to triple my current holdings at around $21 per share.  This will lower my average purchase price and also at the same time make it one of my biggest holdings.

In the future, I’m going to set a target at around $15 where I would consider buying more.  If it doesn’t get that low, then I will hang on to what I already own and see what happens.

In the meantime, I’m going to try and mentally prepare myself for another quarter or two of negative results.  The latest acquisition isn’t likely to show any serious impacts to the company’s revenue in the near term and this is mostly factored in at the current stock price.  On the other hand, if by some miracle, revenue and earnings show some serious improvements this stock could very well take off and I would have bought in at the bottom of the curve (this is a long shot though).

Only time will tell…

PS, I’ve fought the urge to leverage up and buy stock options for this one.

Fast forward to me graduating from college and getting my first job.  I was seriously in awe with how much I was getting paid to basically solve little problems on the computer, and I enjoyed what I was doing.  At the same time, my expenses were ridiculously low.  I think I was paying $500/month for rent, with utilities included.  Needless to say I saved some serious money.  I really didn’t spend money on anything either, besides buying a new truck (which I still have today… paid off).

Today, however, I’m add odds with how I feel about money.  On one hand, I think I should save any extra money I come across, but on the other hand, I have a nice little nest egg.  Should I spend money on material things that catch my eye and not feel guilty about it?

Tonight I’m probably going to go to the Apple store and drool over the new MacBook Air.  If I felt like it, I could throw down some plastic and not think twice.  I wouldn’t have to go into debt to get it, and I think it would be useful to have for blogging, working on websites, etc.  But something inside me feels like I shouldn’t buy it… like I would feel guilty for indulging and spending that much money on something that I don’t “need”.  Not to mention, I spent $550 there two weeks ago buying an iPad, which I still have mixed feeling about, but use pretty much every day.

I guess I have a little guy on one shoulder telling me life is too short to worry about things like this.  If there’s something shiny and new that I think would be cool to own, why not get it.  On the other shoulder is a little guy telling me that I don’t need those types of things and I would be wasting my hard earned money.

Sometimes I wish I was one of those care free types of people that don’t worry about money, except I wonder if they really do deep down.  Do they feel the same way, and maybe even more so, and put on a front of not caring to deal with it?  Not sure, but I’ll let you know what I think about the new shiny laptop that Apple has

One of the main problems as everyone knows is the fact that health care costs are rising at a very high rate.  While there are many reasons for this, one of them is that the industry is treated like a free market, but there is one missing component: information.  Customers (patients) don’t have a clue what the actual price is for the medical treatments they’re receiving.

When I go to the doctor, I really just assume that either a) it will be covered by insurance or b) I will have to pay a small amount like a co-pay or co-insurance.  The true cost is never even exposed to me.  Behind the scenes, the doctors and insurance companies have negotiated ahead of time what they are going to charge and pay for certain services.  This price can even be different depending on what insurance company you have or what groups your doctor is a member of.  And to top it off, if you don’t have insurance, the doctor is going to charge you even more than they would the insurance company!

I thought about what could be a way to help lower these costs and shed some light on how this whole industry is operating, and I decided to do something about it.  I created a website to allow everyday people to share no only how much medical care they received cost, but also which doctor charged them that amount, and what insurance actually paid to the doctor.  If enough people start using this website, eventually we’d be able to come up with serious tools to help insured and uninsured patients lower their bills.

If an uninsured person wanted to go to the doctor, but they were worried about how much it would cost, they could look it up and find the cheapest doctor in their area.

On the other hand, if an insured person gets a new job, how do they know what insurance plan to pick of the 3 or 4 their company offers?  They could look up and compare the different plans according to their age/health and projected medical costs, and pick the one that would mean less money out of their pocket.

Does this sound good?  Check it out and help shed some light on how much medical procedures are really costing by posting your own information.  And if you have any comments or suggestions, post them on this blog and let me know.

The new website: www.ProceedYours.com

We’ll have to see how this plays out…

The first thing to take a look at would be the cost of living adjustment itself.  I found an online calculator here that’s pretty good.  According to it, someone making $50k in Orlando needs to earn $110k in Manhattan, just to keep their living standards.  That’s crazy!  Though it looks like housing is the biggest factor, because you would have to spend 357% more on housing there than in Orlando.

The next thing would be the tax difference.  In Florida, there’s no State income tax, but you can bet most places will.  According to Wikipedia, 7 states do not have a state income tax, and 2 others only tax dividends and interest income.  It’s no wonder all the old people migrate to these states.

Anyways, how would you calculate the adjustment?  Lets say you make $50k in Florida with no income tax and are moving to North Carolina, where income tax is approximately 7%.  Would you just multiply $50k by .07 to see how much extra you need?

$50,000 X .07 = $3,500

So you would need to make $53,500?  Not so fast.  Let’s say you made $53,500 and you had 7% withheld for state income tax.

$53,500 X .07 = $3,745

Something doesn’t add up quite right…

In reality you need to take the current tax free income $50,000 and divide it by 1 minus the tax rate, or (1 – .07) = .93… So:

$50,000/.93 = $53,763

AND

$53,763 X .07 = $3,763

There we have it… So summing up:

(TAX FREE INCOME) / (1 – TAX RATE) = (EQUIVALENT TAXED INCOME)

Then take that and multiply it by the cost of living adjustment to get your total income requirement to keep your same income in a different State.

Many times, I’ve heard of people “paper trading” to test their skills in the stock market without actually putting any skin in the game, so I decided to look around to see if a site would allow me to do just that.  Unfortunately, I couldn’t find one that seemed too appealing.  Either the site was very unimpressive, or it seemed like they just wanted to get my information so they could bombard me with ads.

I gave up on the idea.

A few days later, I noticed an interesting article about a new startup investing website, kaChing.  This site allows you to set up a a virtual portfolio of $10 million and buy and sell stocks.  It includes a hint of social networking, since you can see other people’s portfolios and can share information.  While this pretty cool in and of itself, the real kicker is how the site actually makes money.

If you stick with the site and trade, they assign you an investor IQ, which is basically a automated rating of how good a trader you are.   If you meet some other restrictions, you can then become a “Genius” and people can choose to invest like you.  The customer then sends kaChing money to invest, and whenever you buy or sell in your virtual portfolio, kaChing does the same moves with the customer’s money.

As a Genius, you set your rate for managing money (say a %1 fee for people investing like you) and kaChing takes a cut.  The more money you “manage” the more you and kaChing can make.

Am I the only one who thinks this is really cool?  While I doubt I’ll ever become a Genius, the site is awesome for paper trading.  If you want to follow me, my investor ID is 76659.

Right now, kaChing has around $3 million in actual invested money.  If this idea takes off, those guys are going to make a killing.

The other morning the wife asked me what stock futures were. That got me so pumped up just thinking about derivatives, I probably didn’t need a cup of coffee. I can be such a nerd

Anyways, I figured this would be a great topic to get back into the flow of blogging on FrugalJim, so let’s get going.

The reason this topic was brought up in the first place was because the talking heads on TV and/or the web articles written in the morning like to give a shout out to the stock futures.  They do this to try and give an indication for how the market is going to act once they open up for the day.

Digressing a little, stock futures are derivatives.  These aren’t actually a stock you can buy or sell, but are “derived” from actual stocks.  Just like stock options, they allow you to speculate whether a stock will go up or down at some point in the future.  Not only can you do this with less money than you would need if you wanted to buy the stocks outright, but you can do it outside the normal stock market hours.

The talking heads simply look at the futures to get an estimate of which way the market is moving and act like they know how the market will behave.  The ironic thing is they never go back and see if they were right or wrong.  Just because the market starts off strong, doesn’t mean it won’t tank in the afternoon.

Hopefully I’ll have my next post up by this weekend. See you then!

I’ve learned that a CEO of a company can claim loudly that “The dividend is safe!” only to turn around the next week and cut the dividend by 68%.

I’ve learned the government (Senators) can make speeches about the stability of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, yet have to take over them to keep them from going bankrupt within that very month.

I’ve learned GM really had no chance of staying “a going concern” even though the executives said they were in the process of a turnaround.

I’ve learned executives at Merrill Lynch still got a bonus even though they lost billions of dollars before they were sold to Bank of America.  And speaking of Bank of America, it turns out they paid way way way too much for both Countrywide and Merrill Lynch and knew it at the time.

I guess the point of all this is that when people are out for themselves (whether trying to make money or save their reputation) you can pretty much take what they say with a grain of salt. 

…just another thing to try and keep in mind.

I’m in a relatively good financial position right now, but I can easily look back and see a different path I could have taken.  For example, the wife and I could have bought a more expensive house by using an exotic mortgage instead of our modest townhouse financed with a 30 year fixed loan.  

My truck will be paid off in about a year from now, but I could have easily traded it in for a new loan on a nicer car.  I was especially tempted to do this when gas prices hit around $4 and I was paying about $80 to fill up the tank.

If I had done these things, essentially drinking the whole bottle of wine, I would have been asking for a hangover.  My company just announced it will not be giving any cost of living increases this year, and many people are being laid off all over the country.  Right now, if either the wife or me got laid off, we could probably get by long enough to find another job.  

Unfortunately, many people aren’t in this position.  Either they bought too much house, thinking prices would continue rising, or they bought whatever they wanted, assuming a stable job would allow them to pay off the debt later.  

Hopefully, I’ll remember this in the future and practice self constraint when others around me are living it up and getting drunk.