FNBO To Scottrade

I been thinking about moving all our FNBO Direct savings to my account at Scottrade and putting it all in stocks. One of my favorite stocks, Ford is up over 85% this year and the price of Apple stock has also gone up over the last few months. The goal would be to spread the $9,000 over 10 different companies to avoid putting all the eggs in one basket. I have a list of favorite stocks and overall they've all been going up this year, at much higher rates than at FNBO.

Is this a good strategy? Would you do this with your money? I'm hoping the risks are worth the rewards. This 9k is mostly insurance money so if I have it in stocks hopefully I will forget about it. I can continue building our regular emergency fund at Bank of America and hopefully bring that to $10,000 by 2010.

Also any broker recommendations? Scottrade seems to be the best. I also have an account with E*Trade but I've heard so many horror stories that I don't think I want to deal with them. I have no experience with ING Sharebuilder but their costs seem low.

Any thoughts?

HS

About Us

I am a consultant working for a Fortune 500 company in Downtown Houston. I work in the energy industry in downstream oil and gas operations and commodities trading. I provide IT solutions and support to clients, my experience is mainly SAP Sales and Distribution and Oracle databases. I work full time and my yearly salary is around $75,000 per year.

The spouse is a kindergarten teacher with the local school district. She works full time and her pay is around $45,000 a year. She gets 2 weeks off at Christmas, 1 week off for spring break and 8 off weeks during the summer, all paid! Maybe I should consider going in to teaching.

Together we own a house in Northwest Houston; we have a Golden Retriever dog, a 2 year old female. She hangs around the house all day barking at people outside. We are hoping to add a child to our family soon and maybe get another dog later on down the road.

We are trying to pay off most of our debts. We would like to be more responsible with money, cut back on spending and increase savings.

This blog has been a great experience and I hope it inspires others to get out of debt.

HS

Credit Card Rewards

I'm still addicted to credit cards, mainly for the rewards! Last month I cashed in a $25 gift card to Wal-Mart from Thank You network. Those points came from using our Citi Professional card last year:



Discover cash back is even better! Our Discover spending spree back in February gave us a lot of cash back. We currently have $38.67, we need to spend $150 or so more to cash in $40.00! Last year we got $60 cash back to our savings account and a $25 gift card to Bed Bath and Beyond, all just for using the card. I feel bad since we haven't paid any finance charges to them in over 2 years.


I wonder if they read this blog, I'm sure Discover would not be too happy.

HS

We're Debt Free!

We're Debt Free! from credit cards. The balance on our Citi PremierPass card last week was $0! The current balance today is $11.81 (interest) so I went ahead and sent them a final payment:



I took money out of our FNBO savings and paid off the $518 we owed. I also kept some of the money to buy a new HDTV as a treat :) That left $9,000 at FNBO. I should have the Bank of America account at $1000 this month, for a total $10,000 in emergency savings.

Today we are credit card debt free! I can't believe we paid off all our credit cards. We met our goal of not carrying this debt in to our 30's. Looking back I'm still amazed at our progress, if you sort my postings back to March 2008 you can see we had over $12,000 dollars in credit card debt. The only advice I have for people looking to pay off their credit card debt is: If you make it your goal and your top priority, it will happen. There's proof all over this blog that it can be done.

We still have 2 debts other than the house. One is a car payment, the other a student loan. Both have very low interest rates so for now our plan is to continue to fund our savings. I will post more about those debts in the coming weeks.

HS