Ah, the age-old question:  do the rich pay their fair share in taxes?  Many liberals argue that they don’t, saying the rich owe their success to the efforts of the poor and middle class and should bear a higher percentage of the tax burden in gratitude.  On the opposite side of the spectrum, most conservatives [...]

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I will be at the beach this weekend so no posts today or tomorrow.  I had hoped to have a few posts prepared to fill in the gaps but unfortunately, things have been extremely hectic the past week and I wasn’t able to pull it together.  Things will be back in full swing monday, though.  [...]

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I received an email the other day from Amazon.com (you probably did, too, if they have your email address) advertising their new site Warehousedeals.com.  Normally, I hit the delete button without even reading such advertisements, but this one caught my eye.  I’ve long been a fan of Amazon because of their reasonable prices and the fact [...]

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Every once in a while, the Dow takes a dive.  The latest example was last friday when the Dow fell 395 points, or about 3.13%, which was its largest drop in 15 months all the while oil rose $10 to $138 per barrel.  A 3.3% loss in just one day is no laughing matter.  If [...]

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The topic of passive income has been making the rounds lately.  More specifically,  the blogosphere has been debating the passivity of certain forms of income, such as blogging and real estate,  as opposed to dividends and interest payments.  To that end, I’ve devised a complex, sophisticated mathematical formula to divide all forms of income generation into [...]

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This morning, I paid more than I ever have in my life for a gallon of gasoline:  $3.97.  It was a Chevron station.  8:27 AM eastern time.  It cost me $40 to fill up my Corolla.  Manual.  $40.  Luckily, my Corolla is very fuel efficient and I live relatively close to work, so I only [...]

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I participated in two carnivals this week: Three Rules of Leveraged Investing appeared at carnival of personal finance #155 hosted at Moolanomy and do inflation numbers match your experience? appeared at carnival of money stories #62 hosted at Finance Gets Personal.  Here are a few of my favorite links from both.
Carnival of Personal Finance
Five Things Indiana Jones Can Teach Us [...]

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For centuries, mankind has been obsessed with shiny pieces of metal known as gold.  Even today, investors the globe over often flee to gold in times of economic instability because it has often functioned well as a hedge against inflation and a falling currency.  True to form, gold has been on a tear of late, [...]

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As a certified white person, I love multilingualism and one day aspire to speak at least 17 different languages, the more obscure the better.  French students are a dime a dozen, but how many people do you know who’ve heard of Twi, much less speak it?  Unfortunately, learning obscure west-African tribal languages doesn’t traditionally come cheap.  [...]

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David Swensen is no stranger to the institutional investment community. He has famously managed the Yale University endowment fund since 1985, achieving annualized returns of 17.8% per year over the last decade. His investment approach, commonly referred to as The Yale Model, is an application in the extreme of modern portfolio theory and was [...]

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