Hello. We last spoke about four months ago, when I posted a substantial article on how to pick individual stocks, based on what I had learned in just a year or two of practice.

Yeah, remember just a few months ago, when the Dow Jones was at 9000?

I do have to admit that my interest in stock investing has taken a clobbering over the past year. Part of the reason is that Zecco, the broker which offered free stock trades and allowed me to purchase literally just a few shares of stock to trade with, changed their requirements from a cash balance of $2,500 to $25,000. Ouch.

But a bigger part of the reason is that in a market like this, I just don’t see a point in picking stocks – unless you’re shorting them. Every time I loaded up the Wordpress admin page to write a new post, I’d get a few sentences in before I would just give up.

Meanwhile, the past half year has introduced some new challenges into my personal finance life. My wife has finally found a job she is very happy in, meaning we now both have steady income streams to manage. We’re expecting a child in just two months, and after “congratulations” most people immediately bring up the cost of having a child. We’re also beginning the long process of buying a house.

So I thought I’d brush off the digital dust from this site and try writing a few posts. I made a few small updates as well, like removing the goals meters and investing widget from the sidebar, as well as a few more personal posts, as I’d like to take down the drape of anonymity I wrote this blog under.