My wife and I have been spending a fair amount of time unpacking boxes from our move a few month’s ago. One thing moving tends to do is make you realize how much stuff you have that you no longer need. We literally had two bedrooms full of boxes that we haven’t used in some time (at least since we’ve moved here and probably a lot longer than that!)

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My Investment Experiment this year proved to be an expensive learning experience. While I have a few winners and a load of experience under my belt I made some costly mistakes.

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As I mentioned in an earlier post on Saving on taxes through additional retirement savings I’ve selected an administrator for our solo 401K. In the end after talking with nearly a dozen providers it came down to two choices.

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Apologies for not having this up first thing in the morning. There were a lot more submissions to go through than I expected…

Anyway, without further ado, I present the 80th installment of the Carnival of Personal Finance! I’ll be reading through the submissions I haven’t already today and moving the catagories or deleting irrelevant posts. If you find any problems, please contact me.

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It sort of snuck up on me but I’ll be hosting next week’s Carnival of Personal Finance. Next week’s Carnival will be posted on Tuesday morning due to Christmas. For this reason I’ll extend the deadline for submissions to 5PM on Monday (Christmas day.) To make a submission, please use the submission form at blogcarnival.com.

I was driving to a town about 15 miles from our house and my wife’s office to meet her for dinner last night. Most of the trip is on a rural two-lane highway where traffic typically moves along at 65-70 mph. A deer decided it could make the crossing between an oncoming car and myself and misjudged… Normally I would have swerved behind the deer into the opposite lane to avoid it but the oncoming car made this impossible. I swerved instead to the shoulder but the deer kept on coming and I hit it at approximately 65 mph.

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When we moved to this house only 4 short months ago our only option for broadband Internet was via satellite. We’re about 3.5 miles from town and cable doesn’t come out this far. We’re also roughly 21,000 feet from our telephone Central Office. Normally DSL is limited to 18,000 feet but every month or so I tried qualifying for DSL via Verizon’s web site. To my surprise about 3 weeks ago the site responded that, yes, I could get DSL!

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My wife has a pHd in engineering and is one of the smartest people I know. Her approach to solving problems never ceases to amaze me in both it’s depth of knowledge and practicality. It’s sort of a mesh of high-minded scientific principles and Larry the Cable Guy’s “Git-R-Done” methodology.

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Some of you may have heard of dividend capture strategies used for stocks. I’ve tried it in the past with limited success and no longer look at dividends as part of short-term investments. This year many mutual funds will be distributing relatively large amounts of capital gains. This is due in part to their having used up the tax credits for losses from the tech bubble crash. All this got me to thinking about whether this would work well in a tax-deferred account.

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