Matthew Botos

Last week I received an unusual offer: $500 to remove a blog entry that a company didn’t like customers seeing in search results for their name.

It gave me a brief pause, but was a pretty quick decision: I simply felt it was unethical to take payment in exchange for my right to free speech. One of the nice things about this being my personal blog is that only that argument mattered, with no trade-off against management, advertiser, or investor considerations. If I have one goal here, it’s to share information of interest to the audience, however small it might be.

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With gas prices holding at $4 a gallon, I’m averaging $60 a tank to fill my Maxima with cheap gas. Yet last month, I actually made a net profit on the machinations of Big Oil. Here comes the math:

Gas: -$120

Discover Gas Card Cashback: +$5

Energy Stocks ETF (XLE) Gain: +$134

Total: +$19

So this month I beat Big Oil! My fortunes will probably change next month, though; I usually average 3 tanks.

My sister Catherine just got graduated from college, has some money in the bank already, and is about to start her first job. She’s already starting to think about investing, which is great, so I pulled together some links from my del.icio.us collection for her:

Links for young investors

What would you add or remove from the list?

Long the scourge of taxpayers, our local collector Berkheimer finally has electronic filing for local taxes. This is a great improvement, especially since they began collecting quarterly a few years ago. Better yet, my current employer actually withholds the tax for me, so now I can just click a few times a quarter instead of filling out and mailing a form. It’s almost efficient government!

Visa racked up the biggest IPO in history yesterday, despite a looming recession and a popped housing market bubble. One stellar piece of analysis explained why they didn’t have to worry: because they make their money at the moment of the sale and leave the banks to worry if the bills will ever be paid.

All money is in fees, for both merchants and cardholders. That includes 1% on any foreign transactions you make, to which many banks now add a few points of their own. On my well-worn Citibank card, it adds up to 3% on everything I charged on recent trips to Belize and Whistler, Canada.

You’d make out much better paying the occasional ATM fee, if you don’t mind carrying around wads of cash. Bankrate.com also provides a table of various bank’s currency conversion costs - I think I’ll be getting a Capital One card before my next trip!

After trying homebrew spreadsheets and Quicken to manage my finances, I decided to give mint.com a try. Pure viral marketing finally got me - I saw a friend declare himself a “fan” of the site on Facebook.

Setup was quite easy; it grabs account information with much less fuss than Quicken. It uses an established provider to this, which eases some of the worries that a web startup has all your banking information. From there, you get an immediate overview of your finances, and offers from their presumed partners on how you can save money. Not a bad business model, especially when you consider the email alerts and updates it sends to keep you coming back.

It does have a few shortcomings: it only pulls in your last month’s worth of information and doesn’t always set new categories successfully, making it more difficult to use the budgeting and analysis capabilities. It did turn up some good tempting deals, though it missed some of my current credit card rewards.

The interface is smooth, though, and with everything moving to the web, personal finance can’t be far behind - even Quicken is getting in on the game.

Starting a new job gave me the clearest look at retirement savings I’ve had in a while. Rules of thumb and estimates always seem to change, but this one-page calculation was pleasantly simple:

1. How much of your salary do you want at retirement to travel, spoil grandkids, etc.?
2. How much will you get from social security? (Assuming it’s still solvent in 30 years.)
3. How much will your current savings grow to?
4. How much more do you need to contribute as a percent of your paycheck to reach your total goal?

Sadly, the calulator is missing from Prinicipal’s online offerings, but perhaps there’s a similar one out there. For me, the results were encouraging. Saving early puts me about halfway there, leaving modest contributions going forward. And a few extra precent as a hedge against social security collapsing.