Thursday, July 28, 2011

Extreme Early Retirment

I have a confession, I have been reading this guys blog for the past couple days.  He seems like a really interesting person, with some very counter-culture ideas.  It is very inspiring, and I am happy to provide him some income by ignoring the ads on his site :)

He is a post that I enjoyed about how to spend very little money.  It is basically how the guy (Jacob, I believe), managed to retire at 32 years old.  If you want to learn (waste) about 2 days, start reading from the beginning, hey it doesn't cost you anything but time. :)

His book will though ;)

Monday, July 4, 2011

Historical Tax Rates

I was curious what the top marginal tax rates have been for the last century.  As you can see the last time we had rates this low it preceded the Great Depression.

There is a lot of interesting information on that tax policy website, unfortunately it could be organized quite a bit better.  The Times has an article by Paul Krugman explaining that corporation have ample cash right now, but the problem is a lack of consumers.  You can't trickle down to a not existent middle class.

Friday, July 1, 2011

Financial Independence Sale!

ING Direct is having a sale, with some pretty good deals today and tomorrow.
  • $126 for opening a checking account and direct depositing into it.
  • $76 for opening a Sharebuilder account.
  • $76 for opening an IRA.
  • $76 for referring 2 friends ;)  (Call / email me if you want a referral and I will split the bonus with you)
  • $1776 off closing costs.
I decided to apply for a 5 year ARM @ 3.125%.  Unfortunately, our house probably won't appraise for enough to finance the whole amount anymore, plus ING required 75% loan to value, but we do have some extra cash in the bank at the moment so it might make sense.  Our payments would go from $2200 a month to $1700 a month, which would be really nice with Jen probably not working this year.

And who knows what it is going to be like in 5 years, worst case scenario interest rate raises to 9.125% after 8 years for a payment of around $3000.  So actually that should be doable as well (in 8 years).