Analysts International Corporation to Hold 2012 First Quarter Conference Call on Friday, May 4
April 26th, 2012 | Posted by Global InvestorsAnalysts International Corporation (AIC) (NASDAQ: ANLY (/news_room/Stock?ticker=ANLY)), an information technology services company, today announced that it will release its 2012 first quarter financial results on Thursday, May 3, 2012, following the close of the market. The Company will hold a conference call to discuss its financial results on Friday, May 4, 2012, at 10 a.m. CT.
Participants may access the call by dialing 1.800.946.0716, or 1.719.325.2383 for international callers, and entering the conference ID number 6248202. Interested parties can hear a replay of the call from 1 p.m. CT on May… View full post on Live News from PR-USA.net
First Baby New Expenses? One Family’s Experience
April 5th, 2012 | Posted by Global InvestorsThe following is a guest post is from Elle at Couple Money. They live on one income, and have fun with the second!
When I read MMB’s questions about baby expenses, I shared a bit of our own experience with him. We are just a year ahead of him last summer we had our first baby, a little girl. It has been a wonderfully fun ride so far, with everyday bringing new milestones and challenges.
During the pregnancy my husband and I decided to track the baby expenses on Couple Money as we’re going through this process. We’re not the first parents to have questions about the finances of raising children, so I share our expenses and have asked others to give their input. Some wonderful bloggers have decided to join in the fun and share their own stories, tips, and advice on what works, what doesn’t, and what’s not worth stressing over.
For us, most of the expenses are just small bumps in our monthly budget. I think the main reason is that we made some financial decisions before we became parents that lent itself to reducing baby bills. For one thing, when we first were married we made it a family goal to keep all necessary expenses on 1 income. That allowed us to use the second income to pay down debts, save for goals, and invest for later.
Health Insurance and Doctor Visits
During the first trimester I was dehydrated enough that I needed to go to the ER to replenish; that was about $150 out of pocket. For the most part, though, my pregnancy had been uneventful. The health insurance policy we had when I was pregnant had a $2,500 deductible, so we saved a bit in our general funds to cover the deductible when our baby girl was delivered. Saving up to pay the bill in full allowed us to also get a 15% discount with the hospital.
Once our daughter arrived we quickly added her to my husband’s health insurance policy. That’s been the biggest change to our family budget – our premiums went up about $200/month for the family option.
Housing
No change in our housing bills. We bought our townhouse before we had our daughter. It had 3 bedrooms, so we converted the guest room into her nursery. We don’t have any plans on changing our location, right now we’re focusing on paying down the mortgage.
Daycare
I know that for many parents daycare is a huge expense. From what I saw last year it was about $1,200/month for an infant. Right now I work from home and our daughter stays with me. While it has cut back on the hours I work, the savings from not having her in daycare offsets it.
Food
Since we’re breastfeeding our food bill has increased just a bit to accommodate the extra calories I need to keep up. Since becoming pregnant, we changed our eating habits a bit. We’re focusing on making more meals at home and we a part of a CSA program with weekly deliveries during the part of the year. It’s been helping to keep groceries manageable and we’ve also discovered new recipes and dishes. Our daughter has baby food and some of what we’re eating in addition to breast milk.
Transportation
Even before we found out we were going to have a baby my husband and I were saving up for the vehicle as we’re trying to avoiding taking out a car loan. However we saving up a bit more to purchase a family sized sedan, like a Sonata. Our budget is $10k for the next car. We have the money saved and we’re currently searching for a deal. It’s not an immediate need (tight fit in my Jetta, but fine), so we’re going to make sure we look around a bit before securing the next car.
Clothing/Baby Gear
The first 2 months our bills were higher than normal as we bought a few items we didn’t receive from the baby registry. We waited until our daughter arrived to see if we really needed them or if they were nice to have items. Fortunately most of the necessary stuff was already bought. After the first 8 weeks, our expenses have smoothed out.
We have received gifts from family and friends – both new stuff and gently used. We didn’t have to buy a baby swing, since a buddy’s son didn’t seem to like it. It was practically new and our daughter loved it.
Right now diapers are about $20/month give or take through Amazon Mom and they are delivered right to our door. We get her wipes through Costco where a huge box costs about $20 as well (lasts a couple of months). Any clothes that she needs we pick at Target, Old Navy, or the consignment store around the corner. That’s about $30/month.
This is just a snapshot of our family’s baby expenses. As our little one gets older we know things will change. I’d like to hear from you – what expenses to you have to cover for your little one? What has been the biggest unexpected expense? What’s been the best surprise?
Related posts:
First Baby New Expenses? One Family’s Experience from My Money Blog.
© MyMoneyBlog.com, 2012.
View full post on My Money Blog
MarketRiders Portfolio Manager Review: First Look, Asset Allocation
March 30th, 2012 | Posted by Global Investors
Time to try out another online portfolio manager – MarketRiders.com. While previously-reviewed Betterment is an website/broker/advisor combo that handles all the decisions and trade executions for you, MarketRiders is more like an online portfolio coach telling you what trades to place yourself at the discount broker of your choice. Both services offer diversified portfolios using low-cost index ETFs, but think of it as one cooks you a nice tray of lasagna while the other one provides you a detailed, step-by-step recipe.
Free Trial Sign-up
To find out what the recipe is, you have to sign up for a free 30-day trial with your credit card information. The regular price for the service is $149.95 a year or $14.95 per month. You will be auto-enrolled after 30 days, but MarketRiders promises that canceling is easy and can be done completely online within two clicks. I can confirm it is indeed that easy. Just go to My account > Manage my subscription > Cancel my subscription. Now, what do you get?
(Update: It looks like you can get $25 off the annual fee with coupon code MR25OFF.)
First up, you’ll need a target asset allocation. You can either provide your own, or MarketRiders can recommend one based on a risk questionnaire. (Ah, the same old risk questionnaire everyone uses because a better alternative has not been discovered. Research has shown that how much people like risk is pretty much dependent on how well the market has done recently.) In any case, I said I was a “medium risk” 33-year old that wants to retire by age 50 with $100,000 to invest.
Here are the target asset allocation (70% stocks/30% bonds) and specific ETF purchases they assigned me.
One neat feature is that the your ETF portfolio is tweaked slightly based on what brokerage you wish to use, as some brokers offer commission-free ETFs from certain companies. Curiously enough, even though many of the ETFs recommended were from Vanguard, using discount broker TD Ameritrade instead of going in-house with Vanguard would actually cost me less money in commission as their 100 free ETF list includes all the Vanguard ETFs as well as several iShares ETFs.
Rebalancing
So, you buy the ETFs that are recommended. That’s easy enough, but the real long-term benefit of MarketRiders is the ability to keep rebalancing your portfolio to keep it closely aligned with your target asset allocation throughout market cycles. It’s easy to be swayed by market forces and stop buying stocks in a bear market, only to miss the surprise bullish moves (like recently!). You want to manage your emotions when investing, and following directions given to you by an objective third party will help you do that.
However, to do this you’ll have to update MarketRiders whenever you make an additional purchase and provide your trade information (# of shares, execution price).
I like the goal and intent of MarketRiders. I like low-cost, diversified portfolios. I like the ability to enter a custom portfolio. I like rebalancing regularly to maintain the right risk profile and to combat behavioral weaknesses. I like the idea of a unbiased “coach” telling me what I need to do at a reasonable price. I like the free trial to check out their designed portfolios.
The main problem that I see with this service is that people are lazy. I know I am. I read and write about personal finance every day and even I only rebalance my portfolio at most a few times a year. To do this, I made my own Google Docs spreadsheet and check in every quarter by just adding up all my holdings in each asset class.
I don’t like the idea of having to enter every trade that I make manually. I make lots of trades every month, through various accounts including 401k purchases. I feel that MarketRiders should license the same aggregation tools that other sites use (like Personal Capital) to see my portfolio details without any manual entry. Otherwise, I don’t like the idea of paying $150 a year to do something I’ve already been doing on my own for free with roughly the same amount of time and effort.
If MarketRiders seamlessly synced with all my brokerage accounts and saved me time and effort by telling me when to rebalance things inside my entire portfolio spread across IRAs and 401ks and Solo 401ks, I think I would pay $99 a year in exchange for that service (if only as a double-check to my current practices). But with all the extra work required, it’s hard for this DIY investor to justify the price. I really hope they take my advice on adding account aggregation.
For the same reasons, I think the newbie investor would rather go with Betterment or a Vanguard Target Retirement fund instead as well. MarketRiders charges $150 a year + commissions, which is much more than Betterment would charge until you reached portfolio sizes of well over $60,000.
Related posts:
MarketRiders Portfolio Manager Review: First Look, Asset Allocation from My Money Blog.
© MyMoneyBlog.com, 2012.
View full post on My Money Blog
First Baby! Things To Buy, Things Not To Buy? (Ask The Readers)
March 24th, 2012 | Posted by Global InvestorsAfter a long period of trying and a month before our planned IVF procedure, we recently found out Mrs. MMB was pregnant! We were being carefully optimistic so we kept things rather quiet until now. We just had another ultrasound at 20 weeks that indicated we were going to have a little girl. We are beyond excited.
Of course, this discovery has also opened the floodgates to baby shopping and Mrs. MMB is itching to start nesting. As this is our first child, we started reading a lot of books but are still rather lost.
For the parents out there… In financial terms, how was having a baby different than you expected? Did it cost more money than you thought? Less money (ha)? What items were really important to buy properly? What things did you buy that weren’t very useful? General advice, specific recommendations, whatever. I know you readers are quite smart, so I’ll take whatever advice you have to give. 
I know that there are many other blogger with newborns, so I should look for some applicable posts as well. I noticed that we are about a month behind J. Money of BudgetsAreSexy. I already have a good amount of material simply about the costs of infertility itself. The level of assistance possible today is incredible, but it takes time, energy, and a lot of money.
Related posts:
First Baby! Things To Buy, Things Not To Buy? (Ask The Readers) from My Money Blog.
© MyMoneyBlog.com, 2012.
View full post on My Money Blog
The America First or Last Movement Attempts to Replace NCLB
March 13th, 2012 | Posted by Global InvestorsNCLB?s failing policies is destroying millions of children lives, and seriously undermine the US Economic growth potential. America First or Last Movement is a grassroots initiative launched by the New Jersey Minority Educational Development organization to break its stronghold on our nation. View full post on Live News from PR-USA.net
UK Broadband Switches On First Commercial 4G TD LTE System In The UK
February 29th, 2012 | Posted by Global InvestorsView full post on Live News from PR-USA.net
Free 1-Year ShopRunner Membership (First 10,000 Only)
December 3rd, 2011 | Posted by Global InvestorsShoprunner is similar to Amazon Prime in that it offers unlimited free 2-day shipping with no minimum order amount from a variety of online merchants. Today 12/2 only, they are offering a 1-year free membership to the first 10,000 people who sign up. Update: The offer page says it’s over as of ~4pm Pacfic. But if you had technical difficulties that led you to miss out, you can still email them as following until the end of today, midnight Pacific. Via Fatwallet.
We are doing our very best to stay up and stable, but there are literally thousand of folks just repeatedly hitting the submit button on the form. We have an alternative solution and rest assured this will enable to get your free Shoprunner membership without fear that you will miss out. If you send an email to Promo@ShopRunner.com that simply contains your name and email address, as soon as we have stabilized the website, we will email you a unique PIN# that will allow you to sign up for your free 1-yr. membership.
Retail value is $79. Another possible alternative for a free membership through the AmEx Gift Chain promotion if you register and buy a $25 gift card from Walmart.com as your first purchase. Everyones seems to be reporting getting Shoprunner as a first gift.
Related posts:
Free 1-Year ShopRunner Membership (First 10,000 Only) from My Money Blog.
© MyMoneyBlog.com, 2011.
View full post on My Money Blog
Vente-Privee $20 Credit With First Purchase Using American Express
November 28th, 2011 | Posted by Global Investors
Vente Privee is kind of a fancy Groupon-like deal site that sells designer things in 72-hour sales. That doesn’t sound like something I’d normally be interested in at all, but they are offering a $20 statement credit with your first purchase with an American Express by 12/31. (American Express is an official partner.) Check out this application page (my referral link) and you should see the offer. “American Express Cardmembers get a $20 statement credit with first purchase*”. Referring others to the site yourself after joining will also get you $20 in store credit.
As mentioned the sales rotate each day, but I was able to find a nice sugar shaker for $10 + $5.95 shipping and some kid’s clothing for $6 + $5.95 shipping. Not bad for some free stocking stuffers. Many of the cheaper items sell out fast… go figure. 
Fine print:
* Terms and conditions: To redeem this offer, you must use any eligible American Express ® Card to make your first purchase at vente-privee.com (vente-privee.com) through 12/31/2011. An Eligible Card is defined as a valid American Express Credit or Charge Card, in good standing and not in default, issued in the U.S. either by American Express or by a licensed third party bank issuer of American Express-branded Cards. Certain Cards are not deemed Eligible Cards, including American Express Cards issued in the U.S. by Department Stores National Bank, Prepaid Cards (including, without limitation, American Express Gift Cards and Serve cards) and American Express Corporate Cards. If your Card is replaced during the promotional period, please call the customer service number on the back of your Card for assistance. Statement credit will be issued approximately 6-8 weeks after the qualifying purchase is charged to your Card account. Your ability to earn rewards may be based on the amount of your purchase after the statement credit has been applied. Individual rewards program terms and conditions apply. If the purchase(s) is subject to finance charges, finance charges will accrue on the total amount of the purchase(s) prior to the application of the statement credit.
American Express press release.
Related posts:
Vente-Privee $20 Credit With First Purchase Using American Express from My Money Blog.
© MyMoneyBlog.com, 2011.
View full post on My Money Blog
Clear Capital’s® First Look Into 2012: A Market Flirting With Triple-Dip by Spring
October 12th, 2011 | Posted by Global InvestorsClear Capital (www.clearcapital.com (http://www.clearcapital.com/)) has released its monthly Home Data Index™ (HDI) Market Report, with news of U.S. home price gains of 3.5 percent comparing the most current rolling quarter through September, to the previous one. Also, the company published its first glimpse into 2012, providing a forecast through the first quarter, and while prices increased this most recent quarter, the company forecasts a small skid in prices for the fourth quarter of 2011, and a continued slide in home prices through the end of the first quarter of 2012.
Report…
View full post on Live News from PR-USA.net
Arizona First in Nation to Require Athletes Pass Concussion Education Exam Through Program Designed
August 18th, 2011 | Posted by Global InvestorsBarrow Neurological Institute at St. Joseph’s Hospital and Medical Center, The Arizona Interscholastic Association (AIA), and the Arizona Cardinals today announced a major breakthrough in concussion prevention and research that will immediately affect more than 100,000 Arizona student athletes.
Today, Arizona becomes the first in the United States to mandate all male and female athletes undergo concussion education and pass a formal test before play through a new program specifically geared toward students. The program is expected to become a model for other states to follow.
Arizona ranks second in the nation for traumatic brain injury and until… View full post on Live News from PR-USA.net
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