This weekend, my wife and I both sat down in front of the computer. We both placed one finger on the mouse button, and clicked. Yes, in retrospect it was kind of lame, but I wanted to celebrate the moment: I had just paid off my first car.

The car is a 2003 Honda Civic which I named Stella, after A Streetcar Named Desire. I bought it in the summer of 2003, a few months before I moved into an off-campus apartment and needed transportation. I took out a five year loan at a rate of 0.9% interest.

(Yes, 0.9% interest. Having a father as a lawyer, who spends his whole day negotiating, can be quite handy).

So next month, I will take that payment of $278 and funnel it right into savings. It will also make paying the loan on my Honda Accord a bit easier, as for the past six months we have had make payments for both cars.

Now to the other good piece of news. Until recently, Massachusetts did not allow competition for auto insurance rates: They were dictated by the state government. That alone isn’t great, but what made it worse is that the payments were setup in a “socialist” way, in that you didn’t get breaks for being a safe driver, and you didn’t get penalized for being a bad driver. My wife and I have never been in an accident, never gotten a ticket – heck we’ve never even been pulled over. And yet we were still paying a premium of $200 a month.

Then a few months ago, Massachusetts changed their rules and allowed agencies to set their own prices. What does that mean? I found a quote for progressive for $76 a month, or about 1/3rd what I currently pay! And this is for better coverage!

This, combined with making my last car payment, means more than $400 a month extra we will be saving, which is just fantastic.

So I’ll be honest: The market scared me a bit this week. I do not believe this is the top; I do not believe we are in for a multi-year bear market; I do not believe gas prices will be $26 by this summer (but that’s another story).

I began last week with what may turn out to be a mistake: I sold half of my biggest winner, Cleveland-Cliffs (CLF). Here’s why:

As you can see, as of May 23rd the stock had lost a lot of its steam, and I was very worried it was forming a top here. I also was just astounded at how hot commodities were, and became worried that they were too hot, considering how much I was reading about them. The MACD lines had crossed, which sometimes signals a change in momentum. Lastly, I had just hit the mythical 100% number for my CLF holdings, and doubling my money always makes me feel greedy.

Why might it have been a mistake? Well, the stock is up 13% since I sold half, which is part of the reason! So what might have prevented me from selling? First, nothing about the fundamentals of iron and coal have changed, meaning Cleveland-Cliff’s main product is still in as high demand as ever. From a technical standpoint, the RSI wasn’t throwing off warnings yet, the stock was still above its 25 day moving average, and was ripe for a bounce off of its lower trend line. Whoops!

With that cash, I bought two stocks: Occidental Petroleum (OXY), an oil play that my mom (of all people!) made me aware of, and GrafTech (GTI), who makes electric arc furnaces. I don’t pretend to understand exactly what those are, but I do know that they’re part of a supply chain that is in great demand right now, and has a solid looking chart.

And that’s when I got scared. I am very happy with my performance so far this year, and being 100% invested during this correction just seemed to risky to me. So I sold all of Google (GOOG) and Helmerich & Payne (HP). Google hasn’t done a thing since it’s major jump on earnings a few weeks ago, and HP seemed to be stalling out on me.

Our analysts here are showing just slight signs of being worried, but their recommendation isn’t to start moving into cash, but instead to just reign in buying many new stocks.

YTD Performance as of 05/28/2008: Up 13.34%
Performance since inception (04/01/2007): Up 57.8%

Portfolio Holdings

Changes

5/22/2008	SELL	Cleveland-Cliffs (CLF)	93	132
5/22/2008	BUY	Occidental Petroleum (OXY)	96	104
5/22/2008	BUY	GrafTech (GTI)	25	430
5/28/2008	SELL	Google (GOOG)	566	31
5/28/2008	SELL	Helmerich & Payne (HP)	58	252

It’s been another solid week for my portfolio, even with market’s performance yesterday. The masses are still rife with fear, meaning it’s a great time to invest, so I became fully invested as of last week. The more bad news, the better!

Cleveland-Cliffs (CLF) is close to having doubled for me since I bought it. While I would normally be inclined to take at least some profits here, commodities show absolutely no sign of slowing down, and CLF is definitely a leader there.

I am a bit disappointed about Google (GOOG) and VMWare’s (VMW) performance so far this year. I was warned about picking the leaders of the last bull market, as they rarely perform the same in the next bull market, but I just felt very confident about both of these companies. I will still give them time though, especially Google.

Renesola (SOL) has amazed me, up nearly 80% in one month! People can keep talking about how the solar market is overvalued and bound to crash every day now. With my company having made 400% profits from First Solar (FSLR), and me now profiting from SOL, I strongly feel that solar stocks are here to stay. I wouldn’t be too surprised to see a correction of some sort sometime soon though.

Since last updated, I added F5 Networks (FFIV), an internet networking infrastructure company, Fluor Corp (FLR), an engineering company involved with oil and natural gas, and Marvel Entertainment (MVL), of comic book fame. I added FFIV due to its strong performance over the past month, as well as it being a subject I’m familiar with (I have a natural tendency to be more interested in tech stories). I added FLR as a test of buying a stock after it’s spiked on earnings, as I did some reading about how most stocks continue to rise even after a one day gain of 10%. Lastly, I added MVL due to the success of Iron Man and betting on the fact that they will continue to make large profits off of their properties (now that they full control the movie making rights to them). I am a bit hesitant about MVL though as it pick based mostly on a few stories I read, and not as much the fundamental and technical research I like to do.

Finally, I sold Immersion Technologies (IMMR), maker of touch screens, after tepid performance for the past month, and added a favorite from last year, China Fire & Security Group (CFSG). CFSG was one of the biggest winners for me last year, and took a massive hit due to what appears to be equivalent to a gossip column about one of the major stock holders. China’s infrastructure boom is huge, especially with the Olympics, and this company seems to pick up contracts left and right to do the fire and security systems for these buildings.

YTD Performance as of 05/21/2008: Up 11.81%

Portfolio Holdings

Changes

Date	Action	Stock	Price	Shares
5/8/2008	BUY	F5 Networks (FFIV)	27	373
5/13/2008	BUY	Fluor Corp (FLR)	187	53
5/13/2008	BUY	Marvel Entertainment (MVL)	34	292
5/19/2008	BUY	China Fire and Security Group (CFSG)	11	1124
5/19/2008	SELL	Immersion Technology (IMMR)	10	620

I feel bad. I missed my child’s birthday. Considering the fact, however, that my child is a subdirectory on a shared server, I don’t feel too bad.

I started this site just over a year ago, starting with my personal, um, personal finance history. My main goal with the site, at first, was to document my learning process as I began to study, and trade, stocks. I also touched on some personal stories which I thought taught good “life lessons”, such as how I was nearly robbed blind by unauthorized ACH transactions.

My day job is as a web content manager at an investment advisory service. Obviously, my company has played a big part in my learning experience when it comes to investing. I haven’t touched much on my actual job though, as it doesn’t have all that much to do with personal finance. But I do know a fair amount about search engine optimization and site monetization, as I deal with that almost daily.

I tried a few times to do that with this site. The problem, I found, is I had to turn the site into something I really didn’t like.

I only like writing when I feel I have something interesting to contribute. I only like linking when I feel that link also offers something interesting to read. I like writing accurate titles instead of ones that appear high on organic searches. I like voicing the contrarian opinion (invest in individual stocks!) instead of repeating the same dull advice of the masses (index fund!). I like venting about things that frustrate me, hopefully in a constructive manner.

What I do not like is writing about the same subject you see almost daily on other personal finance blogs (do we honestly need another list of how to increase your gas mileage, or a comparison between Roth and Simple IRA’s?). Speaking of which – I hate writing lists. 90% of the internet now seems comprised of lists. Do we really need to dumb down our writing that much? I do not like writing several posts a week that solely consisting of links to other sites, solely in order to increase my page rank. I do not like writing posts that serve solely as advertisements. And once again, I do not like regurgitating the same personal finance information you see all over the internet.

So where does this leave me? With a site that won’t make me money (although I was able to sell an ad or two, which was nice) or make me an internet star. It also leaves me ostracized from the personal finance (please find it in your heart to forgive me for using this term) blogosphere. But I’m fine with that, because what it does leave me with is a site I enjoy writing for, and hopefully one that at least some people find entertaining and useful.

I have to admit: I just wrote a list of all the personal finance sites I’ve read over the past year, and pretty much lambasted the ones I really dislike. Then I deleted that, because I’m the type of person who goes to those improv shows but can’t even boo the acts I don’t like (even when you’re told to cheer or boo to decide the winner).

Instead, this is a pretty easy way to find the sites I’m not a huge fan of: In the past month, have they offered $25 to sign up for an ING account? In the past week, have the mentioned a $100 Discover Card offer? If so, chances are I’m not a huge fan. My two problems with hawking these advertisements is that first, I have to read them over, and over, and over again on at least a dozen sites which all latch on to the exact same offer and then mention it every other day on their site.

Second, why do sites which supposedly promote financial responsibility keep pushing credit card offers down our throats? I love credit cards, and I’ve never had a balance in my life, but a lot of people who read these types of sites aren’t in the same situation, and I can’t help but chuckle at the hypocrisy of offering credit cards to them. Even if someone knows how to manage their spending on credit cards, it doesn’t exactly help their score when you try to get them to open up a new account every month. Banks aren’t much better either. Sure, it won’t effect your credit, but slinging your social security number all of the place and having accounts at ten financial institution for a measly $10 or $25 really doesn’t seem worth it – to the reader.

With that out of the way, I’d instead like to individually focus on a few sites that I really do like.

Advanced Personal Finance: This is a really high quality site. Sure, it has a fairly drab design (sorry!), and uses normal paragraph structure instead of a list every other post (gasp!). But it has solid content from a good writer, few ads, no empty posts just consisting of links, and is only updated when it has something interesting to say.

An English Major’s Money: I love this blog. Catchy title too. It takes the word “personal” in personal finance to heart, and more than any other site I really feel as though the writer lets you identify with her financial situation. It’s also the only site I can say inspired me to write more in their style.

Ask Dong: This guy is funny, to the point, and writes interesting posts. He also avoids all the things I hate.

Monogamoney: This is a newer blog, that I found when they left a comment on my site. It’s another clever name, written with a personal touch, and is very open in its writing.

Hmm … and it seems like that’s about it. I think part of the problem is that a lot of these sites don’t offer much to stand out from one another.

So what’s next for The Money Mythos? I’ll continue posting interesting personal finance stories as I happen upon them (or as they happen upon me). I’ll also continue updates on my stock trading, in the endless pursuit to show the average person that they can succeed buying individual stocks (up nearly 10% this year!).

Thanks for reading.

(Click for big)

So it’s been awhile since I’ve done one of these, mostly because I still can’t find an easy way to dynamically display my portfolio online. So for now I’m back to taking screenshots of the spreadsheet I use to track it.

About two weeks ago, for the first time this year, my portfolio went from the red to the black, and I finally showed a profit! My portfolio currently has a gain of 3.63%, compared to -5.59% for the S&P 500. I am very happy to be outperforming that index by over 9 points.

The big winner this year has been Cleveland-Cliffs (CLF), up an amazing 88% since I bought it in mid-December. This kind of performance in a bull market would be exceptional, but seeing this growth from the past four months is amazing. Commodities are very hot right now (and have yet to show any slowdown), and CLF is really leading the way.

I am also very happy with Google (GOOG), which I talked about in a post a few weeks back. It trounced earnings estimates after the unnecessary, fear driven sell-off. I do hope it can keep up the momentum it got from that. My company doesn’t really believe in investing in “last year’s” bull market leaders, which is my only hesitation with holding GOOG.

Two of my other energy stocks – SandRidge (SD) and Helmerich & Payne (HP) are performing decently. It’s pretty funny how I discovered SD – I was watching a somewhat entertaining show called Wall Street Warriors, in which a money manager is heavily investing in Sandisk. Curious as to how the stock ended up performing, I entered “SD” expecting that to be Sandisk, but instead found SandRidge, and immediately noticed how strong the chart looked. So I bought it, and it’s returned 24% since. Not bad for a stock I stumbled upon!

Two of my recent additions – VMWare (VMW) and Immersion Corporation (IMMR) are both down a bit. I’m not too worried about VMWare, but I’ll need to take another look at IMMR (a touch-screen technology company) if it drops much further.

My wife and I married at 22, about three months out of college. A lease started on our new apartment in Philadelphia literally three days after our wedding, so we had a brief honeymoon in Rockport, Massachusetts (just a thirty minute drive north from our wedding!). For the next two and a half years I was in graduate school, paying for it from my day job to avoid a loan, and at the same time starting to pay my undergraduate loan. So vacation wasn’t exactly an option, though we did manage to get to a few family get-togethers.

So now we’re about 26 years old, and with discussions of starting our own family taking place, we decided that it was really about time we take a vacation together – before it’s too late!

About a month ago, I started looking at vacations in the Caribbean. We had never been anywhere tropical, so we figured it’d be a great place to go. Aruba sounded like a perfect destination, until I made the discovery that fares from Boston rarely got below $400 per person. Next I see that hotels average around $300 a night, and that most people spend over $100 for dinner! Adding all this up, along with the miscellaneous fees and spending money for excursions, and we were looking at well over $2500.

I scoured the deal sites that everyone recommended to me, but either they were too strict in their dates, or the “deal” evaporated when you read the fine print (or reviews for the resort).

I had nearly given up hope when last week, I was browsing through Farecast when I saw a small inconspicuous link which said “Deals from Boston”, and below that “SFO for $220.” SFO? As in, San Francisco? As in, a coast-to-coast flight for about $200? Say it ain’t so!

In a frenzy of instant messages my wife and I tried to decide whether to jump on this or not. Of course, while we were doing this, the flight doubled in price back to the standard fare, and I felt crushed. I swore if I ever saw an opportunity like this again, I would just jump on it.

So when the same fare reappeared three days later, I did. I sent a message to my wife – “We’re going to San Francisco in 7 days” – and bought the tickets. Yes, this flight was indeed for the next weekend, or six days from today. I am rarely this impulsive, but after a month of frustratingly searching for the perfect vacation, I wasn’t going to miss my chance.

Next I started looking for hotels. They were quite expensive, with even one or two star hotels averaging over $200. I looked at places outside of the city, but San Francisco is very friendly to walkers, and I didn’t necessarily want to have to drive into the city every day.

So I couldn’t believe it when I saw the Omni Hotel (a four star luxury hotel rated the #3 luxury hotel in the U.S. by TripAdvisor) had a deal for $185 per night through Expedia – about one quarter of their normal nightly rate! I have no clue what caused this deal, but I thought the opportunity to stay in a luxury hotel for less than $200 per night (compared to their standard rate of $699 per night) was too good to pass up.

We’re both very excited about this vacation, but I have to admit that it took a lot of effort for us to spend money on it. See, when it comes to quality, long lasting purchases (like the couches we bought recently, or a new computer), I am able to justify these purchases to myself. Sure, leather couches may cost $2000, but they will last at least five years, and are something we use every single day. In the end, we’re spending about one dollar per day for those.

Compare that to a vacation which might cost $2000 for four days, and we’re instead spending $500 per day, or 500 times the amount of those couches! Of course, sitting at home watching a movie on those couches will not be nearly as thrilling as walking through Muir Woods or taking a cable car to Chinatown. But at least from a financial standpoint, it’s very hard to weigh those two things against each other.

Still, I don’t regret it. We have been married three and a half years, and deserve a vacation together, and I think that we aren’t being nearly as extravagant as we could be with it.

At the investment company I work for, their general approach to earnings is not to play them either way. Overall, I think this makes a lot of sense, because it often seems like a risky move to buy or sell a stock before it announces earnings in hope that it will move one way or the other.

So I really had to be sure before I spoke up on Wednesday’s stock meeting about Google. I should preface this by saying that even though I have been very happy with my portfolios (both real and paper) in the past year, and feel as though I have learned quite a lot in the past year and a half, I still am very nervous whenever I speak up at this meetings. Combined, these people have a century (or more) of knowledge about the stock market, bachelors and masters degrees in finance, and to top it all off are just extremely intelligent people. I think they invited me to this meeting last year both to encourage my interest in investments as well as get a “fresh” opinion on things – even if that opinion was based on a few months of investment experience.

Anyway, about a month ago, Google’s stock got hit when ComScore, who is kind of like the Nielsen ratings of the internet, announced that its growth from online advertising sales was slowing drastically. I immediately put 10% of my portfolio in the stock, for three reasons. First of all, ComScore is notoriously inaccurate. I had actually researched the stock last year as a possible investment, before reading too many stories about how their calls were often way off. Second, by spending a lot of time in the online advertisement industry, I can see first hand how Google’s online advertisements are continuing to grow.

Last, I feel as though Google is one of the best overall companies I have seen in my lifetime. It is well run, has a great business model, and puts out incredible products. I never got a chance to buy into Google last year, so I felt as though buying it nearly 375 points off it high was a great deal.

So at this meeting Wednesday, I said that I strongly felt that the next day, Google would beat earnings estimate and everyone who sold off in fear the month before would dive back in.

And, incredibly, I was right. Google opened this morning up 80 points, or nearly 20%.

I feel really, really good. I know that, like all investing, there was a good amount of luck in this. But I feel as though this was a great example of how you can really benefit from investing when you understand not only a company, but the company’s stock as well.

My only regret was not purchasing ten real-money shares on Wednesday like I was tempted to. If I had done that, I would have gained about $800 overnight.

As many of you know, my full time job is as a web content manager. So besides the multitude of personal finance sites I have in Google Reader, there are also an equal number of web design sites. One of these sites today posted a list (a list!) of the top 25 colorful websites.

So what does all this have to do with personal finance? Well, one of the sites that intrigued me is called Bookkeeping-in-a-Box. I at first thought it was some type of software-on-demand, like Mint.com, for managing personal finances.

Boy was I mistaken.

The site promotes management of personal (and business), which is good. It does this by basically selling a $150 plastic box, which is bad. Of course, it’s described as a “system.” I have read a vast array of systems for managing personal finance, covering nearly every facet you could think of. Yet I never read anything about the fairly straightforward process of, well, putting papers into folders.

I did a double-take at this point, thinking that maybe the picture of the plastic box with file folders was a physical representation for a complex digital repository that would store your latest auto insurance policy.

Nope. That is the actual box you are paying $150 for, that costs $20 at Staples, and is still a rip-off at that point.

Ok, so I am being a bit unfair at this point, because I am not covering what the true value of this product is supposed to be, which is the “system.” Maybe I am giving the general populous too much credit here, but do we really need a system to place pieces of papers into their corresponding folders?

According to the FAQ though, it does much more of that. Apparently it will help you with applying for and securing a loan, and even eliminate overdraft charges.

Here is my system. I’ll even be generous and give it away for free: Buy the cheapest box and file folder you can find. Write labels for major financial area in your life (insurance, auto, utilities, loans, etc). When you get a new document relating to one of those folders, put it in the folder. Get every statement you can delivered electronically – they are just as valid and save paper.

But of course, my system doesn’t come with rubber bands.

I wrote this entry for fun, and it’s probably a result of watching too many Daria reruns. I’m sure this system works well for some people. I just thought I would poke fun at something that asks you to spend an egregious amount of money to help you … save money.