Best BPA-Free Food Storage Containers For Baby Food and More
May 4th, 2012 | Posted by Global Investors
If you’re like me, you have a cabinet in your kitchen stuffed with a scratched and stained mess of Gladware, Ziploc, or Tupperware food containers and an even larger stack of lids that never seem to fit. I even remember telling myself to stick with one brand and three sizes, but after years of dinner parties, brown-bag lunches, and outdoor potlucks, entropy has kicked my butt. Add in the baby on the way, and I wanted to reset and replace with BPA-free (linked to cancer and hormonal disorders) containers and perhaps buy additional ones for storing baby food.
The creators of America’s Test Kitchen ran another test (like with the knives) of the major brands of plastic food containers including Gladware, Ziploc, Rubbermaid, Sterilite, OXO, and more. All were BPA-free and they used the rectangular/square 8-cup sizes. They froze them, put stinky food in them, microwaved them with chili, washed them repeatedly, submerged them in water to test for leaks, and more. Being frugal doesn’t mean just buying the cheapest thing out there, it’s about finding the best value for the price.
The winner? For plastic food containers, the winner was Snapware MODS, which featured good performance across all categories. Most of the better performing ones use the kind of seal that Snapware uses with snap-down “wing” flaps and silicone gaskets. Curiously, the MODS style is rather hard to find now. I did find a set of 20 pieces of Snapware container that looks of slightly less-beefy quality for $15 shipped at Wal-mart.
For glass containers, the winner was Kinetic Go Green Glasslock, which is also sold under Glasslock by Snapware. Made of microwave-safe tempered glass, this type of container seems to be enjoying a comeback due to all the concerns about microwaving plastic. I have to say, it does sound like a great idea as long as you don’t drop things a lot. Freezer safe. Add in that airtight lid, and I’m sold.
The main drawback beside fragility is the additional cost. You can buy their 16-piece set for $70 at Amazon.com including free shipping, although I’d rather buy a six-piece set of a medium-size for about $30-$40. All seem to have overall good reviews, and I also noticed that people seem to really love these cute Wean Green Wean Cubes Baby Food Glass Containers, which are also made by Glasslock (Snapware). Hopefully these can last a long time. Besides, there’s always that baby registry…
Related posts:
Best BPA-Free Food Storage Containers For Baby Food and More from My Money Blog.
© MyMoneyBlog.com, 2012.
View full post on My Money Blog
Why Mutual Fund Fees Are Important But Often Ignored + More Vanguard Fee Savings
April 30th, 2012 | Posted by Global InvestorsI am often reminded when talking with friends and coworkers that most people don’t understand the important of low fees when it comes to investing. The Vanguard blog had a recent post exploring why a 1% expense ratio is much more significant than it appears. The problem is that expense ratios aren’t charged to you directly as a line item like an overdraft fee or a monthly bill – it is quietly taken away in tiny pieces from your returns which makes it easy to ignore.
For another, fees are expressed as a fraction of assets. A 1% equity management fee seems small and reasonable. “One percent” just sounds tiny – as in “there’s a 1% chance of rain tomorrow.” But suppose you reframe fees in other terms. Suppose you expect a stock fund to earn 8% over the long run. Assuming inflation of 3% and a tax rate of 25%, you’re in effect paying one out of every three dollars of future expected return in costs.* A fee of “one third of all of the money you make” sounds like a lot, especially when many money managers could do worse than the market averages.
Basically, if you are expecting to earn 3% a year above inflation after taxes, paying 1% to a manager is like paying 1/3rd of all your earnings. As you can see below, I could own the S&P 500 for as little as 0.05%. Things get even worse when looking at bond funds and their tiny yields.
Research has shown repeatedly that costs matter more than star ratings and past performance. The lower the expenses, the less headwind year in and year out.
With that knowledge, Vanguard has announced another round of fee cuts! Vanguard says the price drops are a result of them being client-owned and passing on any savings resulting from increased assets. Others speculate that it’s a reaction to competition from other low-cost ETF providers like Schwab. Either way, investors win. The drops are pretty small, but to me it’s like getting a little guaranteed boost in returns that will compound every year. A selected sample of funds with fee drops below:
| Funds In My Personal Portfolio | Old expense ratio | New expense ratio |
|---|---|---|
| Vanguard 500 Index Fund (Admiral/ETF Shares) | 0.06% | 0.05% |
| Vanguard Total Stock Market (Admiral/ETF) | 0.07% | 0.06% |
| Vanguard Small-Cap Value Index Fund (ETF) | 0.23% | 0.21% |
| Vanguard Small-Cap Value Index Fund (Investor) | 0.37% | 0.35% |
| Vanguard Total Bond Market Index Fund (Admiral/ETF) | 0.11% | 0.10% |
| Vanguard Inflation-Protected Securities Fund (Investor) | 0.22% | 0.20% |
Admiral shares are now open in most index funds with a $10,000 investment, and you can always start like I did with the Investor shares at $3,000 and convert to Admiral when the balances grows. ETF offer very low expense ratios, but you should also keep in mind the cost of trade commissions. Buying Vanguard ETFs and mutual funds directly with an account with Vanguard is free. TD Ameritrade also offers commission-free trades on a wide variety of Vanguard ETFs (along with other providers).
Over the last year or so, Vanguard has made several moves that lowered my portfolio costs. They added Admiral shares, removed purchase fees on their Emerging Markets fund, and dropped expense ratios again.
Related posts:
View full post on My Money Blog
Hosiery And More Is Willing To Help You Up The Heat And Glamorize Your Looks
April 28th, 2012 | Posted by Global InvestorsView full post on Live News from PR-USA.net
Link Digest: Mixing Work & Passion, Invest in Memories, Stable Value Fund Warning, and More
April 27th, 2012 | Posted by Global InvestorsHere are some more links worthy of sharing:
The Overjustification Effect
A smorgasbord of behavioral psychology that questions the idea that there is nothing better in the world than getting paid to do what you love. This is a very complicated topic but the article makes some good observations.
Memory as a Consumer Durable (Atlantic)
Another twist on the whole “buy experiences, not things” theory. What if you treated a memory as “consumer durable” good much like refrigerators, furniture, or a car? In similar ways, they provide constant satisfaction and/or pleasure, and they last a very long time. In that case, should we acquire them while we’re young so we can enjoy them the rest of our lives?
Stable value 2.0, fewer investor guarantees (Reuters)
If you own a stable value fund in your retirement plan, you should check to see if changes were made to any of its principal guarantees.
The 401(k): Americans ‘just not prepared’ to manage their own retirement funds (WaPo)
401k were designed to be a supplemental account to pensions, but now they are a replacement. If you know what you’re doing, it’s good, and it’s nice because you can take the money with you across jobs. But the total account balances are nowhere near what people need to retire as a whole. Maybe we need something else.
“If the 401(k) is supposed to be the primary retirement vehicle for the average American worker, then it needs to be consistent with the information and financial ability of the average American worker, who is just not prepared to manage funds like that over the course of a lifetime.”
GMO 2012 1st Quarter Letter
The most recent letter from Grantham talks some sense about why most managers can’t afford to have the proper long-term mentality for market-beating returns.
…ignoring the volatile up-and-down market moves and attempting to focus on the slower burning long-term reality is simply too dangerous in career terms. Missing a big move, however unjustified it may be by fundamentals, is to take a very high risk of being fired. Career risk and the resulting herding it creates are likely to always dominate investing.
CarrierCompare: The iPhone app your carrier doesn’t want you to see (CNN)
An iPhone app that takes data (signal strength, response time and speed) from users and analyzes it together to find which carriers have the best service and coverage for any given area.
Related posts:
Link Digest: Mixing Work & Passion, Invest in Memories, Stable Value Fund Warning, and More from My Money Blog.
© MyMoneyBlog.com, 2012.
View full post on My Money Blog
The Perils of Paying for Status
An article in Scientific American magazine about our desire to feel powerful and achieve social status affects our decision-making. If you’re feeling insecure, you’re more likely to overpay for products and/or buy more stuff than you need. Simply knowing this common weakness may help you spend more wisely in the future.
Nutella Class Action Lawsuit
Nutella calls itself healthy, when in fact the first two ingredients are sugar and vegetable oil (fat). Class action lawsuit ensues. Lawyers get rich. Regular folks who bought the stuff can get $20 with a claim, with no proof of purchase required. If you’ve ever bought Nutella spread since 2008, you should check if you’re eligible.
Social Security and Medicare: Proper Planning Pays Off Big
I’m not an expert on this stuff, but this Morningstar article seems to do a pretty good job of summarizing the ways to maximize your Social Security and Medicare benefits and minimizing any penalties.
I Quit My Passion and Took a Boring Job
A guest poster at GetRichSlowly shares his story of quitting a job he loved (teaching high school math) and taking on a job that pays the bills (accountant).
Bestselling book’s financial promises don’t add up
Allan Roth at CBS Moneywatch does a great job debunking a “bestseller” book that is one of many misleading scams that pushes whole life insurance as “infinite banking” or “make your own bank” as a good way to build wealth. It’s a great way to build wealth, but only when you’re the one selling the whole life insurance!
What Does the Prudent Investor Do Now?
WSJ article by author Burton Malkiel about his outlook on stocks and bonds. If you can’t read it directly, try here and click on the first result.
In today’s environment, the minimization of investment fees is more important than ever. A 1% investment management fee may appear to be very low when measured against assets. But when measured against a 7% equity return, that fee represents more than 14% of the return. Against a 2% dividend yield, the fee absorbs one half of the dividend income.
GMO Quarterly Letter Q4 2011 (pdf)
Another letter to investors that I have come to enjoy reading each quarter. Jeremy Grantham gives some good investment advice, and also some market opinions that may or may not be right. I don’t necessarily agree myself, but I like his style. Right now he only likes “high quality” US equities, and he hates going long on bond duration to reach for yield.
Related posts:
Link Digest: Paying For Status, Nutella Class Action, Social Security Planning, Being Your Own Bank, and More from My Money Blog.
© MyMoneyBlog.com, 2012.
View full post on My Money Blog
More Patients Finding Right Fit In Uk Dental Care Via The Web Now
April 1st, 2012 | Posted by Global InvestorsWord of mouth used to be the way that a person found a dentist, but these days people care a lot more about getting the best care that they can from the right dental clinic.
View full post on Live News from PR-USA.net
More Statistics On 401(k) Target Date Retirement Funds
March 15th, 2012 | Posted by Global InvestorsJust as theorized by a previously-mentioned academic paper about target funds, a new Bloomberg article talks about how some mutual fund providers like PIMCO and Invesco are now adding things like commodities futures, options, and currency swaps into these all-in-one funds. Will all these bells and whistles be worth the added cost? I doubt it, but differentiation is important in marketing. The article also included some interesting stats about these funds:
Investments in the [target date retirement] funds have swelled more than 380 percent since 2005 to about $343 billion as of September, according to the Investment Company Institute, a Washington- based trade group for the mutual-fund industry. [...]
The majority, or 53 percent, of plan sponsors that automatically enroll participants in 401(k)s use target-date funds as the default investment, according to a 2011 report by the Plan Sponsor Council of America, a Chicago-based trade group.
There are more than 40 target-date mutual fund families employers may choose from and some sellers also offer them in collective trusts or customized versions, said Jeremy Stempien, director of investments for the retirement solutions group at Morningstar Investment Management. “We can see tremendous discrepancy, tremendous differences among asset managers,” said Harvard’s Pozen, who’s also a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “I don’t think most people understand what they’re getting.”
Fidelity, Vanguard and T. Rowe Price Group Inc. controlled about 75 percent of the target-date assets in 2011, according to Morningstar. The average fee for a target-date mutual fund last year was about 1.1 percent, according to Morningstar, which included all share classes and retirement years such as the 2030 or 2040 funds.
Fees for the funds at Pimco and Invesco averaged about 1.2 percent. Vanguard, which mainly uses three broad-market index funds in its series, had the lowest expenses at about 19 basis points, or 84 percent less than the more expensive funds. A basis point is 0.01 percentage point.
Vanguard reported yesterday that in 2011 about 64 percent of new enrollees in 401(k) plans administered by the company invested solely in a target-date fund. The Valley Forge, Pennsylvania-based firm managed about $100 billion in the funds as of Feb. 29, according to spokeswoman Linda Wolohan.
I don’t invest in any of these funds, but I keep track of them because they are where the industry is heading. I have recommended Vanguard Target Retirement 20XX funds to family members, but have adjusted the “date” to match their own situations.
Related posts:
More Statistics On 401(k) Target Date Retirement Funds from My Money Blog.
© MyMoneyBlog.com, 2012.
View full post on My Money Blog
What’s More Important Than Money?
March 15th, 2012 | Posted by Global InvestorsIs there anything more important that money in this world?
“Anyway, no drug, not even alcohol, causes the fundamental ills of society. If we’re looking for the source of our troubles, we shouldn’t test people for drugs, we should test them for stupidity, ignorance, greed and love of power.” — P. J. O’Rourke
What’s more important than money? Time and health.
I used to be really greedy (and still am to an extent), but recently I’ve started to believe that time and health are more important than money. Now don’t worry I’m not here to create world peace or to preach to you. I just wanted to share my thoughts on the importance of health and time.
“People want to experience what they think only millions can buy.” — Tim Ferriss
Time is precious because once it’s gone it never comes back. You can always find more ways to make money or how to cut back on expenses. You’ll never be able to get time back. You’ll never be as young as you are right now.
I wanted to share a quick story about my friend Tom and time…
I used to hang out with Tom fairly often growing up. We were both the kind of dudes that worked full-time while studying. When college finished I was stoked to get to hang out with friends more often. Tom on the other hand decided that he need to work after college. His logic is that more money equals more girls and more fun. Over the years Tom has lost touch with everyone and has forgotten what it’s like to have fun. While I totally support working long hours to reach your goals, I also firmly believe that you’re never going to get your time back.
You can have all of the money in the world, but what’s it worth if you don’t have any time to enjoy it?
“Lost time is never found again.” — Benjamin Franklin
I always took my health for granted. When I was in college I would boast about how I also worked full-time. I would often consume a few cups of coffee before an exam because I was behind on sleep. Fortunately for me, I could get away with all of this because I’ve always had decent health (knock on wood!). Recently I’ve been around remarkable individuals that just haven’t been blessed with good health.
When you have good health you can do anything. The only thing stopping you is laziness and various other excuses (bad breakup, not enough time, or the classic “too busy”).
Here’s a quick story on health and money…
Once you’re health is gone with a chronic illness that can’t be properly treated you won’t care about money. I was chatting with one my supervisors and I asked him if he was planning on working much longer. He told me that the benefits help him pay for medication that his wife needs to treat her MS. He also let me know that when they were young they never had money. Their trips would be simple and very rare. Then in their later years they began to travel more. Now that they have money saved up, they just don’t have the health to travel. This older gentleman told me that when you have you health you can do anything you want to.
Here’s another quick story on health…
One of my friends work long and odd hours because he’s saving up for the future (which is what we all should be doing). The only problem is that he’s horrible with time management and taking care of his health. His odd hours have caused him many health problems because he doesn’t sleep properly. His lack of sleep often leads to grumpiness and he ends up eating junk food all of the time. He looks much older now. He has more money than ever but his health is deteriorating.
“Without health life is not life; it is only a state of langour and suffering – an image of death.” – Buddha
I would like to think that there is. You can be a really successful person that has been blessed with good health and the ability to manage time like a champion. The problem is many of us can’t master excellent health, time, and money at the same time.
That’s why I feel that time and health are much more valuable to us. I’m also not oblivious to the fact that we all need money to survive and want money for comfort and luxury. I just feel that money is useless without time or health.
“It is health that is real wealth and not pieces of gold and silver.” — Gandhi
View full post on The Financial Blogger
More Luxurious Than Ever: 2013 Ford F-Series Super Duty to Offer Platinum Series, SYNC with MyFord T
March 12th, 2012 | Posted by Global Investors2013 Ford F-Series Super Duty brings no-compromise truck luxury to the market with the first-ever Platinum heavy-duty pickup, complete with unique design cues inside and out
Super Duty Platinum will offer a wealth of standard features including SYNC®, MyFord Touch®, navigation, rear view camera, Remote Start System, power-telescoping mirrors and power-adjustable pedals
For the first time, the 2013 F-Series Super Duty will also be available with a truck-specific version of SYNC with MyFord Touch, offering tactile button controls and large rotating knobs to accommodate truck users who may be wearing work gloves
Ford F-Series Super Duty customers demand a truck… View full post on Live News from PR-USA.net
Facebook Status Like Games – A Great Way to Attract More Fans
February 23rd, 2012 | Posted by Global InvestorsFacebook status like games is a great way to attract free Facebook fans and can be used as a tool for Facebook like this status ideas. Therefore, learn how to play games on Facebook and attract more and visitors to your websites.
View full post on Live News from PR-USA.net
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