Business is Personal (Finance)

• College Costs, Prisoners' Dilemma

  Sep 26, 2009
  For the past few years, I've been putting money away in Ohio CollegeAdvantage 529 plan for my kids. Just recently, CollegeAdvantage brought back their referral bonus program and various personal finance sites (examples: MyMoneyBlog, The Sun's Financial Diary) are posting... 0

• Apple iPhones in China (or how to get a free vacation)

  Sep 22, 2009
  Now plenty of things are way cheaper here in China. In this previous post, I listed a few costs of living -- for example, breakfast for 40 cents. But some things are more expensive -- usually luxury goods. Some quick... 0

• BSR = why ETNs suck

  Sep 21, 2009
  I've held BSR (BearStearns Alerian MLP ETN) for about 2 years now to try to capture the MLP segment. We all know that BearStearns was taken over by JPMorgan. Early March, JPMorgan released AMJ that looked nearly the same but... 0

• The wrong way to invest

  Sep 20, 2009
  I've been checking my investment portfolio lately and with the market rebound the past few months, my portfolio has exceeded it's 2007 peak return high. So it's not surprising that articles such as the following at Yahoo Finance have started... 0

• Reports from the USA

  Sep 16, 2009
  We're regularly in touch with friends back in the USA as it's pretty easy/cheap with VOIP phone services. Recently, almost everybody is saying local economy has slowed down drastically in the past 2 months. Perhaps the heart of the recession... 0

• The Price of Gold

  Sep 14, 2009
  If you've read my previous article on 401K fund selection, you may have noticed I had American Century Global Gold as one of our options. I personally overweight my 401K to tax-inefficient holdings to keep low tax-drag equity investments in... 0

• Health care costs ... in China

  Sep 10, 2009
  If you can fog a mirror, you know the big topic in the U.S. is health care reform. President Obama just made a big speech and people on both sides have been staking out their positions for months now with... 0

• Hiring off Craigslist

  Sep 10, 2009
  During our startup phase, our hiring came from networking. But after a while, not only does the internal network get exhausted but sometimes the recommendations can even cause conflicts when the recommended people don't interview well. (Unfortunately, a small company... 0

• Reality check on housing

  Sep 9, 2009
  I was browsing the internet and came across this article http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/32756481/ns/business-real_estate. The meat of the article, I don't really care about. We all already know why we're in this mess It's the secondary headline that caught my attention.Official says a... 0

• Labor Day

  Sep 7, 2009
  Now that people have partially recovered from a full day of BBQing hot dogs and guzzling beer, perhaps some reflection on the history of Labor Day is in order. Let me quote a snippet from Wikipedia:"The first Labor Day in... 0

• The cost of living in China

  Sep 7, 2009
  As I mentioned in a previous entry, the average worker in Taicheng/Taishan earns about $250 USD/mo. Hence, it is not surprising that the cost of living is much lower than anywhere in the developed world. Here's a before-and-after breakout of... 0

• Making the move overseas - Part 2

  Sep 1, 2009
  If moving into a new home is a lot of work, moving overseas is even more so. Here's roughly how the move went down:3+ months beforeObtain passports for my kids. I wanted to wait until my youngest was at least... 0