October goals: eat in, track spending, leave credit cards at home

It looks like a lot of people are trying to get more control over their budgets these days. I think the financial crises of the last couple weeks, and the discussions over the bailout plan, have made everyone feel a little anxious. Here are the three things I’m going to try doing differently in October.
Goal #1: Don’t [...]

AT&T vs. Verizon

Here is an email Jon wrote to his father and a couple friends:
Fellow investors:
 
I’ve been very interested in investing in Verizon (Ticker: VZ) and AT&T (Ticker: T). Both are trading at very low adjusted price-to-earnings ratios; AT&T’s is 3.5 and Verizon’s is 5.2.  
Adjusted P/E = (current price/forward earnings)-dividend yield
Furthermore, both are yielding over 5 percent. My  one [...]

How much should you be saving for retirement?

I’ve written before about the flaws in mortgage calculators. Retirement calculators, it turns out, have their own problems. In this interesting Salon article, the writer tries several different calculators, some of which have absurd results. One of them suggested she needed to be saving $47,000 a year.
This is a hot topic now, as many people have recently [...]

Where we’re investing now

Jon and I have been sitting on the sidelines for a little while, but we think now is a good time to invest. In particular, I think it’s a good time to buy an index fund. First I looked at Vanguard funds, but many of them have a $3,000 minimum, and we don’t have that [...]

Our portfolio

In a comment on yesterday’s post, Scott asked whether we’ve calculated the annual return on our portfolio, and compared it to a low-cost index fund. I’ve been meaning to post about our portfolio, so figured this would be a good time.
We haven’t been investing long enough to make a good comparison. We had bought a couple [...]