Later today my wife and I will enjoy our tradition of dining on sushi for Thanksgiving. I hope all of you are with family or friends and are enjoying the day.

Thanksgiving is a great day to sit back and reflect, catch up with loved ones, watch football and of course plot your strategy for the Black Friday sales.

I won’t bother listing all of the things I have to be thankful for here. Just know that you are all on that list. Thank you for sharing this part of my life with me, for making me think, and for keeping me focussed on the future as much as the present.

“See” you all tomorrow.

In an earlier post - Prospering from Prosper - I had pointed out a site called SavageNumber which had a number of tools you could use to help with your Prosper loan selection. A month or so ago I discovered another site which has an amazing array of stats about lenders and borrowers.

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I logged into Prosper today to see if I had enough money to bid on another loan. I didn’t, but I did notice that the one loan I expect to default as actually made a payment! The borrower is still far from being current, in fact the entire payment amount went to interest and fees, there was no reduction in principle.

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I’ve been a BzzAgent for about six months now. For those of you who haven’t heard of them, you occasionally receive products to try out and recommend to friends and associates.

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Having goals is so important to getting things done. That is the main reason I have this blog, it forces me to publicly set goals, which makes me strive that much harder to meet them. I believe some goals should be easily attainable but some should be hard. If you set your sights too low you’ll never push yourself to your full potential.

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My wife and I are in a rather unique (for us anyway) situation this year. She lost her job at the end of January, and was given a lump-sum severance equal to nine months of her salary. The severance was taxed at the 25% bonus tax rate which means a huge chunk was withheld by the federal government. To make matters worse, there were no 401K contributions taken out of the severance amounts, meaning the full amount would be taxed.

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This has been an extraordinary year for us. Between my wife getting laid off, moving to Illinois and the changes in my job I haven’t had a lot of time to plan things out. It’s mid-November already and time is running out to put plans in motion that will affect our taxes for the year.

Rather than one huge post, I thought I’d break things down into bite-sized chunks. The first post on reducing our tax burden through additional retirement savings will be posted later today.

I’ve had a Direct Merchant’s Mastercard for years (they have now merged with HSBC). Today I got an alert from TrueCredit that my account had been closed?!?

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After some deliberation, I’ve decided to start cashing in the I Bonds I purchased a year or so ago. It’s not that I don’t think they are good investments, they just don’t fit my needs right now.

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New I Bond rates were announced this morning. The Bureau of the Public Debt kept the fixed rate steady at 1.4%. Combined with the inflation component of 3.1% as I posted about earlier, the rate of return for the next six months will be 4.52%. Again, not great but not too bad either.

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