AskDong

There is a common predicament that many people find themselves I’m. Save money or pay off debt. While this question can be coolly answered by crunching the numbers, it’s not really a question that that cool cold numbers can answer. This like many other financial questions is one that is really about precedent and emotion rather than the numbers.

Like most people I have debt. Luckily, my debt is good debt. Mortgages and student loans. However I am very aware that many people are burdened by not so good debt. Credit cards and even worse- pay day loans. These loans often sport egregious interest rates. Crunching the numbers almost always will tell you to pay that kind of debt first.

It’s a much easier argument to make that I should invest excess money instead of paying off either my mortgage or my student loans. The interest rates on those are less than 5.5% without even considering any tax advantages. There’s no guarantee that I could do better in the “Market,” but there’s a good chance that I can - just not these last few months. However, when you’re paying 20% on a credit card, it’s highly unlikely that you can earn any kind of return close to what you’re paying let alone beat that.

So why would you ever sock money away into a emergency fund, or into a savings account when you have credit card debt? I actually think for many people it does make sense, maybe not logical sense, but emotional sense. Just as studies have shown that people would be better off being auto-enrolled into 401ks, I believe the sooner someone is able to enroll into a savings plan the better off they are. The key is creating a savings, mutual fund, or brokerage account and turning the spigot a half turn. The savings should be more symbolic than anything else. It wouldn’t make sense to save $1000 a month and then making the minimum payment on the credit card payment. But for someone is doing a good job paying off the credit card in excess of the minimum, it can make sense to stash $25 away a month toward an emergency fund.

The other day I attempted to download my transactions from Yodlee as I do every month. Yodlee is an account aggregation service that I’ve been using for years, and one which I have been very happy with.  I went to clink the “Export Transaction” and it was gone, nowhere to be found.  I didn’t know what was going on.

I contacted Yodlee for the first time ever, and got a response the next day saying that I could only download transactions from only one selected account at a time. I went to the site, and selected an account and found that I could indeed download transaction from one account at a time.  However, given that I use Yodlee to track and aggregate all my accounts, I found this “new” functionality defeated one of the biggest reasons I used Yodlee, the ability to consolidate all my account into one report that I can then import into Excel.

Daunted, I return to Yodlee and sent another message, asking “why they turned off this feature (downloading all transactions) that was critical to my use.” Yodlee responded thus:

“The ‘Export completed transactions’ option in Yodlee MoneyCenter has always been respective to the account selected under ‘Show from’.”

What? Am I imagining this? I know or at least thought I knew that I could export all my completed transactions. Hell I even have spreadsheets with ALL my completed transactions.  I’m pretty sure I didn’t download my transactions account by account and then put them together myself.  I respect Yodlee’s prerogative to change their product given that I’m not paying for it.  I’m tiffed that they’ve removed functionality.  Really, what can I do?  However, I don’t like being told that I don’t know what I thought I knew. Yes, I’m getting on the years. I’ve got back pain. I’m growing hair in unexpected places.  And, admittedly my memory is not what it used to be.  However, I am pretty sure I was able to download all my transactions not so long ago.

Are any other Yodlee users encountering this said same problem?

I own a iPhone. I even stood in line to get it. So this post is going to sound awfully hypocritical, and you know what, it probably is. Except for those slated for sainthood of the world, people tend to fall into camps 1) hypocrites 2) justifiers. I’m more the former than the latter. I was pointed to the following Canadian Ad from Virgin Mobile(some people may consider the ad a bit risque> from the folks at Crackberry.

There are so many things wrong with the ad, and I’m not in the puritan camp. I think it’s ok to show a little skin. Hell, I’m writing this without a shirt - though I guess my shades are drawn and I’m home alone, and Virgin mobile hasn’t offered to film my daily routine, so it’s not really a big deal. Nor is it just because I could be mistaken for being an Apple iPhone fanboy. It’s the grumpy old anti-consumerist in me.

Virgin Mobile targets a younger (often students) and generally speaking more financially constrained crowd. I would know I used to be a Virgin mobile customer. I was on a prepaid plan not too many years ago. Many people on prepaid plans are on them because they don’t have good credit. I wasn’t one of these individuals. I was just trying to be frugal. I hardly use any minutes, so the paying by the minute actually made more financial sense. I switched off that plan when I went to a family plan that made even more economic sense. Now, I’m an iPhone Family plan that’s really not very economic, but quite fun

What Virgin is selling is a lifestyle. Nothing wrong with that lifestyle, but they are marketing a lifestyle knowing full well their target market cannot afford that lifestyle. How many 20 year olds live alone in such swank digs? I know when I was 22 and straight out of college, I lived in a rodent infested apartment with ratty carpets with two other guys. While everyone is responsible for their own actions, it would be naive to believe that we, the Consumerist North Americana, are not a influenced by the images we are constantly shown. I don’t have a problem with the Ads such as this that pitch the high life, I just wish that there was also more counterbalancing images. Maybe they should show the same girl featured in the Ad asking mom and dad for money, or eating ramen noodles?

-Sent from an iPhone

On Friday, the U.S. stock market rallied nearly 3% in one day. That rally is even more significant if you take into account that the stock market was down in morning trading nearly 1%. The market swing was nearly 3.5 percent. While I don’t really have any comments on where the market will be heading. I’m not a market predictor, just a someone who pretends to be a know-it-all. Some of the reasons that have been given on for that one day spike are however interesting and topics unto themselves

• Oil Drops nearly $4
• Dollar at 6 month high versus the Euro. This goes hand in hand with the drop in oil prices
• European Central Bank holding steady at it’s short term rate at 4.25%

All three items above are related. Because oil trades in US dollars, a drop in oil prices can be partially attributed to the strength of the dollar. That in turn may be fueled by the European Central Bank’s reluctance to raise interest rates despite rising inflationary pressure. In this regard, the ECB is not too different from it’s U.S. counterpart, the Federal Reserve. However, more people expected that the Europeans would be more hawkish on inflation. Raising interest rates tends to create currency strength for two reasons. 1) Lower expectation on inflation (in that particular currency) 2) Investors move money into said currency for the higher interest rates.

Beside currency, and inflation effects, there’s also very much an investment substitution effect. In the past, bonds and stock tended to move in opposite directions as people shifted money from one to the other. Today the same story seems to hold for very much the same reasons. As investors move out commodities such as oil, they often need to park their money in something else, i.e. the stock market. This not a perfect relationship, but there never is a perfect relationship between anything.

Sorry to any readers who may have been inconvenienced yesterday. I upgraded from version 2.1 of Wordpress to 2.6. This upgrade was not quite as easy as my last upgrade, almost all attributable to the fact that I skipped over a few different iterations. The takeaway lesson is to upgrade more frequently. I was inspired to make this upgrade in order to use the WordPress app on my iPhone. While I don’t want to get to technical as it interest nobody but myself, I was surprised how the information available to solve the problem was less than stellar regarding what seemed like a common problem.

My Wordpress Categories Dissapearred!
Somewhere between WordPress 2.1 and WordPress 2.6, Wordpress got rid of the wp_categories table and replaced it with wp_terms, and wp_terms_taxonomy. Plunging directly into the belly of the beast (i.e. myPhpAdmin), I found that while my ids were there and correct, all the names and descriptions were gone. As a result I had to “manually” update all the rows with the right information. When I did a google of the problem, I found what I needed to know. But with all apologies to David Cumps, his solution of manually editing each category didn’t fly with me. I have too many categories, and I am fundamentally a lazy person. However, I credit his solution to pointing me to the root of problem and what I needed to do. I did have the backup logs for my database, and by using them and some excel string parsing I was able to create update statements for wp_terms and wp_term_taxononomy that hopefully has fixed the problem. Now, if I can only get my category cloud back…