The Sensible Dollar
A blog of my financial life.

ING Direct Lowers Rates Again

Posted In: . By Steve

No surprise, but today ING lowered their orange savings interest rate again. It is now 1.65%. Taking a look at their current CD rates, I would say a few more rate cuts are in our future.

 

BofA Preferred Shares

Posted In: . By Steve

Last week I bought some Bank of America preferred stock with the small amount of cash in my portfolio. I had no real reason, other than the cash was boring and I figure the risk/reward was about lose $100/ gain $500. So far it has worked out with BML-Q more than doubling since I got it.

Anyway, I am going to try to update the rest of the moves I have been making in case anyone is following along.

 

Rebalance Location Problems

Posted In: , . By Steve

I have been having trouble recently figuring out how to do an account rebalance to bring my assets in line with my desired allocation. The problem is that I have several accounts of different types and moving money between them is not practical or possible.

For example, I need to rebalance out of US bonds and into commodities among other things. The problem is that the bonds are in the 401(k) and commodities are in my taxable account. I can't just sell $3k of bonds and move that money into my taxable account. I hadn't thought of this problem when I made my investment plan, but I guess it's pretty common, especially when one account is much larger than others. Luckily most of my asset categories are available to me in my 401(k) and the ones that aren't are a relatively small chunk, so balancing into them via pumping in new cash is still possible.

Anyway, to simplify my life a little, I am merging an old Roth IRA from T. Rowe Price into one from Sharebuilder that I have been using for the last few years. I prefer using cheap passive ETFs over their mutual funds anyway.