37…The years keep going faster… One year older, one closer to retirement, one further from childhood…

37 doesn’t seem to be a big deal. 30 was, mainly because in my youth I had some pretty ambitions plans for where I was going ot be by then. When I turned 30 I think it dawned on me that things were not going to go the way I thought they would and it hit me pretty hard for a bit. I’m older now, calmer and much more realistic than I was in the years leading up to my 30’s.

There is a great deal of serenity in having a plan and sticking with it. Even though my wife and I are facing some serious challenges with regards to the stability of our jobs I have very little stress over it. It would suck to be sure but we’re in pretty good shape overall.

Saw this notice when I logged into Virtualbank today:

At VirtualBank, we are constantly striving to make banking the best we possibly can. We are upgrading the online banking section of our website. These upgrades will start at 6:00 PM EST on Friday December 9th and will conclude on Sunday December 11th at 9:00 PM EST. During this time, online account access will not be available. Please note that during this time you will be able to write checks and use your debit card.

Our client service department will be available for account inquiries during the following hours:

Friday December 9th from 7:30 AM to 9:00 PM EST
Saturday December 10th from 10:00 AM to 6:00 PM EST
Sunday December 11th from 12:00 PM to 6:00 PM EST

If you need to plan a transfer or bill payment, please do so prior to 6:00 PM EST on December 9th. Bill payment and transfer services will be available again upon completion of the upgrade.

The online banking section of the website will have a new look and feel, improved easy to read statements and OFX support.

Thank you for banking with VirtualBank and we appreciate your patience during this time.

Its nice to see banks and financial software finally standardizing. Although Money seems to work OK with the QIF (Quicken) format files that Virtualbank currently supports there are other accounts which do not seem to work so well. (I hate typing in transactions…)

I find myself using VirtualBank less and less. They haven’t kept up with the 4% rate I get at HSBC. I do have the account there set up with TrasuryDirect so I can buy bonds but have been parking the funds I have earmarked for bonds in 28-day and 90-day T-Bills laddered out to mature when I need them.

Just got this in email:

Greetings from Amazon Mechanical Turk,

The following is a summary of your Amazon Mechanical Turk activity for the
week ending Nov 26, 2005.

Weekly HIT Activity
- Number of HITs accepted: 666
- Number of HITs returned: 2
- Number of HITs abandoned: 1
- Number of HITs submitted: 664
- Number of HITs approved: 875
- Number of HITs rejected: 190
- Amount earned this week: $24.81

I’ve probably spent 3 or 4 hours doing these so making minimum wage at least… I worked on them solidly for a couple hours but got bored of it. I now just go to the site when I’m waiting for a compile to finish or some other thing. There are certainly ways to make more money, but few that involve less work…

The end of the year is approaching and its time to take a look at our investment holdings.

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I missed the open enrollment for my benefits at work. Not a huge deal, just means I’ll be keeping the same life insurance as last year. I had thought about buying a term-life product a while back but got too busy. (bad excuse I know…)

Again, we’re still adequately insured just not as permanently as I’d like.

My wife and I are planning a quiet holiday at home, no travel, no cooking etc. We will be celebrating the holiday with our traditional Thanksgiving Sushi Feast @ Benihana later today. Not that we don’t like turkey, just not enough to want to spend two weeks eating the leftovers… The first year we met we went out to eat on Thanksgiving and as expected found most restaurants closed. Benihana was open and we both like sushi so a tradition was born.

I hope you all are doing whatever it is you enjoy in the company of friends and family. I’ve got a couple ideas for articles which I am going to work on later today.

I haven’t seen it too widely publicized yet, but Amazon has launched their Mechanical Turk site. It’s a site which uses human processing to solve problems. Currently the only opportunities I see are getting paid $.03 per “HIT”. (A Human Intelligence Task, or HIT, is a question that needs an answer. A HIT represents a single, self-contained task that you can perform to completion and collect a reward. You may do as many HITs as you like, whenever you like, in any order.)

It’s possible to do several hundred an hour while watching TV or whatever which translates into something above minimum wage. I did around 400 of them in a couple hours today. You can have the cash sent to either your Amazon Gift Certificate account or as cash to your bank account.

Enjoy the cash!

I was updating MS Money today with all of the transfers I’ve done in the past few days. November is looking really good from a net worth perspective. Our 401Ks are doing very well (fully recovered from October and then some). Our expenses are down a lot from previous months, mainly dining and other non-essential expenses. We also received some cash from the former owner of the horse we had to put down earlier in the year. She had pledged to pay for about 1/2 of the $5000 in veterinary expenses, so far she’s come up with around $1000.

Our net worth is up nearly 5% month to month and we’ve yet to realize about 2/3 of our income for this month. This is coming off of a small downturn in October though.

Hopefully we’ll be able to continue the trend. I’d love to hit my short-term savings goal early.

I’m not fat but am a little heavier than I should be. I’m 5′11″ tall and weigh in at around 215lbs. Ideally I’d like to get down around 185 or so.

As I wrote earlier, I’ve been researching Term Life Insurance coverage. As some of you may know, there are different classifications for insurance including Normal, preferred, preferred plus etc. I am generally in very good health, have no history of serious illness in my family (grandfather did die of cancer but he was relatively old at the time) so I assumed I’d be able to get the best rates for term life. In looking at the quotes however I see that I need to weight a bit closer to 200 in order to qualify. The difference in premiums for the $500k of insurance I am looking to buy is around $70 a year. Not a huge amount of cash but a pretty big percentage increase (> 20%).

So, new goal. I am going to attempt to lose 15 lbs by the end of December. I can wait until then to obtain my insurance as my current policy at work will continue until then. I don’t mind taking on the risk for a short while as I’ll still have 1.5x my salary in life insurance paid for my my company.

I have (had) a fair amount of cash sitting at Virtualbank. Part of it is earmarked for paying off my 0% credit card balance in January. The rest is savings. I’ve been using it to purchase I Bonds for a month now and plan to continue on that path at least until the new rates are announced in May of 2006. Virtualbank is paying 3.55% which by today’s standards kind of sucks…

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