Personal finance

2007 has been a good year for those investing. Short term Yields are up as well as stock market.

I used 2007 to invest most of my money that I had made during last bubble. Specifically I have done three things:

• Invest with Merrill Lynch financial adviser. My portfolio at Merrill includes mostly ETFs that cover diversified sectors and countries. I also have AMT free MUNIs to provide bond market exposure (mostly short to intermediate term)

• For earlier part of decade, I have been dollar cost averaging into Vanguard STAR fund. This is a fund of funds that covers large portion of equity market, both US and international, as well as basket of bonds going fro short term maturity to long term maturity. Last month I took the profit and re invested with Vanguard Wellington, another balanced fund with both equity and bond exposure.

• I cleaned up my personal stock portfolio at Scottrade. Got rid of losers that I was holding on to since 2001-2002 time frame. Added GOOG, T, USB and TYW.

On the yield side, I have recently moved to www.fnbodirect.com from hsbcdirect.com to take advantage of 6% APR until end of September. I also have a CD with 5.4% yield at Worldsavings. Recently I have established position in HLFAX which is an interesting floating rate fund yielding > 6%.

My goal is to keep adding to this blog to share my financial journey. Hopefully it can help folks looking for investing ideas. I will try to respond to all questions to educate folks.

June 2007
tech-finance guy