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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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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I’m happy to be hosting the 28th installment of the Carnival of Investing this week. There are nearly 30 posts in this week’s edition and while I haven’t read them all yet, the ones I have appear to be pretty well written.

Special thanks to Jonathan at MyMoneyBlog for keeping the Carnival going. Next week’s host will be Mighty Bargain Hunter.

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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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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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Well it turns out my company still considers me highly compensated, they just changed the rules to allow higher contributions by such employees to our 401K plans.

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The inflation based (variable) component of I Bond interest rates won’t be known for sure until April 19th. (Consumer Price Index Home Page) Because inflation was abnormally high in September last year due mainly to high energy prices (Katrina), the variable component (which will go into effect May 1 based on September - March changes in CPI-U) will likely not be more than 1%. In fact, as of February, it was slightly negative!  Prices have been rising somewhat though so I expect the change in CPI-U to come in around .25% for the period which would translate into a .5% variable component.  I Bonds purchase between November and April would be earning a rate of 1.5% for their second six month period.  Far from outstanding but still not bad considering the 6.73% they are earning now.
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I love stocks. The idea that my money can work so hard for me (with some work on my end) just tickles me to no end.

As I’ve written about in the past, I’ve recently begun to fund my ‘play money’ account again after a long absense. By play money I mean money that I can afford to lose. This doesn’t mean I want to lose it or am willing to gamble it away on some speculative play. Certainly, there will be trades that go against me but hopefully, if I’ve done my homework, I’ll be right more than I’m wrong.

Which brings me to the $5000 experiment…

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Just saw the following comment to my Goals post:

Hi, just reviewing your goals. Curious why you would not count your house equity as part of your savings. If you truly live the dream of cashing out and moving abroad, you can count on that equity to help along the way. I’m same age, similar goals, but have 2 kids so about 12 years from “retirement” as I need to get the kids grown and out of high school. What was your decision to go with ibonds? why not keep in stocks, which return historical rates higher than 6%?

thanks. Joe

Since I’ve been remiss in posting over the last week or so, I thought I’d answer this one at least…

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Before I started my last job about 2 1/2 years ago, I worked for a web services company here in the midwest. There I had a 401K plan that because of the bust was worth less every quarter even though I was putting money into it… I’m sure many of you were in the same boat.

When I left the company to start my new job I decided to leave my money there, mainly because it was simple. A couple of things are making me rethink this however.

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