It's Tuesday, so here are my article recommendations for the week. As always, I tried to pick out the most interesting and original pieces. Incidentally, if you run across some articles that you consider especially interesting, or if you happen to have written one yourself, e-mail me a copy and I will post it here.
This week's Carnival of Personal Finance was hosted by Blunt Money.
Online Savings Blog describes Mint.com a new personal finance website that aggregates your financial data all in one place. To be able to do so they need all your passwords and user names... yeah, that sounds like something I would do. Why on earth would anyone risk their personal information by sharing it with any third party online? I visited the site and they claim to be encrypted, biometrically protected and so forth. I am sure that they think they are extremely secure, and I will grant that maybe they are, but why would I even want to take that risk? I can get the same benefits by buying Quicken software and running it at home. Sorry, I just don't get it.
Cash Money Life continues his excellent series about getting an MBA. This time the topic is the cost of the degree. I can testify that the cost of this degree is atrocious, but Patrick missed the biggest cost of all associated with an MBA: the opportunity cost - i.e. the cost of foregoing two years of income. Can't blame him for missing that cost - he hasn't taken that class in b-school yet... :-) Incidentally, I have a couple of mini sites on the topics of getting into business school, and acing the admissions interview.
Probargain Hunter has an interesting piece about Why Plug-In Hybrids are not a very environmental solution. Funny. I reached a very similar conclusion on regular hybrids. I fear global warming needs to be battled on a larger scale than shelling out extra cash to drive a hybrid. The sentiment is noble, but appears misguided.
The Bag Lady wrote an article explaining that not all 401K plans are the same. Don't I know it. Readers of this blog will have read my detailed adventures regarding my company's conversion of its 401K plan to a new provider. By the way, today, after about eight months of working on it, we finally signed the agreement with our new provider: ADP. Now the real work starts. Bag Lady, you may be interested to know that we looked at Vanguard as one potential provider for our plan, but decided against them. They could not provide the level of service that our company required. That's too bad, because their fund selection is excellent, and most of our personal portfolio is in Vanguard funds. I was cheerleading for them, but no dice.
1 comment:
Hey, thanks for the link! My company also uses ADP for payroll administration and such, and so did my previous company. So I'm not sure how they ended up having different administrators. The funny thing is my first company is smaller, but got Fidelity. I'm really not sure who made up the contracts, but it's weird. Anyway, good luck with your plan! ADP for payroll isn't that bad, but they had problems calculating paid time off at my old company.
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