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Canceling Mortgage Escrow Account
A couple years ago, I wrote about how my mortgage company consistently mis-calculated my monthly escrow payment, arriving at figures that were either too high or too low, depending on the time of year the escrow analysis was done. Well, this past summer, the mortgage company ran another analysis and again came up with a…
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Maxing Out on Credit Card Reward Cash
I’ve always been a big fan of credit cards that pay cash rewards. Pay the balance off in full each month, collect the free money – what’s not to like? I started out in the early 90s with a Discover card, which was one of the first to offer cash back rewards. Then in 2004,…
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Mortgage Escrow Follies
A year or so back, the mortgage on our primary house was sold to CitiMortgage. Prior to this happening, I was aware of quite a number of horror stories about CitiMortgage, so when the sale was announced, I was a little apprehensive. However, one thing I’ve learned over the years is to always look at…
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Tax planning 101…
OK, so our 2007 taxes are done. Up till now, taxes were always something I did after the end of the tax year. At that point, all the forms are available from the relevant taxing authorities; tax software is available; I know exactly how much we made, how much we paid in taxes; etc. So…
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Taxes, painting and stuff
It’s been a while since I wrote anything here, mainly because I have been swamped at work, getting ready for a presentation next week at Educause, my first foray into public speaking since, oh, 1995 or so. That was back in the days of transparencies, so it’s been a while. And I do have to…
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Tax Time Again
You know you’re a financial geek when you’re working on taxes a full 4 months before they’re due, and before the tax year in question has even ended. The People’s Republic of Maryland hasn’t even released its 2007 tax forms yet, so for now, I’m working on fed. This year, for the first time, I’m…
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Let’s go paperless
I’m on a paperless kick. I’ve decided that I have too much paperwork cluttering up my file cabinets, desk drawers, etc., so I’m getting rid of as much of it as I can. My goal is to shrink my paperwork collection down so that it only takes up one file cabinet (I currently have three).…
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XP and QEMU
Last week I decided to try building a virtual machine to run Windows XP. I figured I’d install XP, install all the recent patches, then make a snapshot of the virtual disk. Then I’d have a clean XP install that I could use to run various apps as needed. Several years back I purchased a…
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Bye-bye Taxcut, hello TaxACT
Don’t look now, but it’s Tax Season again. This is usually the time of year I start looking for the best deal on H&R Block’s TaxCut product, which I’ve been using for several years. Truth be told, I’ve always been pretty happy with TaxCut. I usually pay between $15 and $25 for the “Deluxe” product…
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Late Christmas Present
Got a late Christmas present yesterday from an unlikely source: my employer’s 401(k) provider. Well, it actually came in early October, but I didn’t notice it until the other day when I checked my quarterly statement. Now, the plan has always had a decent selection of investment choices, but there have always been a bunch…