Claire over at Tired but happy has posted an excellent review of the book Money Without Matrimony. While I no longer fit the demographic this book targets, it would have been nice to have in my previous relationship.

I would like to say though that us married folks get discriminated against too…especially those of us who don’t have children.

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Our accountant finished our taxes last week. We just about broke even. I sent a check to the Feds for $604, including $5 in interest. We’re getting $581 back from the state of Michigan.

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It was bound to happen sometime. My first late loan payment from Prosper showed up on my account today. Apparently the borrower either didn’t make their first payment or it failed for some reason. The borrower has “D” credit which statistically means a 6.2% default rate. Hopefully this loan won’t go into default however.

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As I thought, I watched the market for much of the day. Was an interesting ride. My IE portfolio was down over $400 for the day at one point, then up over $200. I ended the day up just under $100.

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I had Friday off and am home today as well.  Friday I couldn’t help but watch the markets on and off all day.  I resisted the urge to become a day trader (because I don’t know enough about what I am doing) and only made one trade.

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A few days ago, May 12th actually, I got concerned with the run-up in the overall markets and subsequent drop in the Dow. I shifted our 401K accounts more into cash and bonds. The Dow closed at 11,380 that day and has subsequently dropped to 11,128. So I saved us a couple thousand in losses.

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Two days ago saw the largest drop in the Dow in three years. After an initial recovery yesterday the Dow slipped yet again by an appreciable amount. All of my stocks are now down but yesterday Shanda (SNDA) saw a nice increase of over 10%.

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Once again the stocks in my portfolio are taking a dive. The rest of the market is too so I’m not terribly worried. Overall I believe that the stocks I’ve picked are solid companies with good future prospects. This week looks like it will be a roller coaster ride for the markets in general. There is a ton of volatility in commodities and significant inflation worries, made worse by the Chinese allowing their currency to appreciate against the dollar.

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Our trip to Arkansas has been canceled. Too bad too, we were both somewhat excited about the area. For about what our house is worth (assuming prices haven’t dropped too badly here) we could have bought a slightly larger house (which we don’t need…) with 85 acres of land. All this within 20 minutes of where A (my wife) would be working.

She still has the trip to Maryland on Thursday. I’m still not all that excited about it. To get something roughly equivalent to the home we have now will cost an additional $100-150k. We can trade down of course but what is the point of moving then. I guess we wait to see if the job is interesting to her and what the salary is like.

As most of you know, my wife was laid off in January of this year. She spent a lot of time updating her resume (after nearly 12 years in the same job that was no small feat.) Anyway she’s getting some interest now and the time will soon come for us to make some choices.
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