In Debt We Trust

Saw this website for a movie called "In Debt We Trust". I haven't dished out the $35 for this so called documentary but I did watch the trailer. From what I saw it looks like part of it is a bunch of people who blame their own financial mismanagement problems on the credit card companies. Credit cards are not a supplement to your income, and that is where people go horribly off track with that thinking. I've learned it the hard way and I'm finally getting myself out of my own mistakes.

Granted, credit card companies try their best to be sneaky in their offers but at the end of the day the individual consumer needs to take responsibility for their own actions.

If I can find it online somewhere for free I might watch it but it really just looks like a piss and moan session to me.

My Real Estate Mistakes

I bought my condo almost a year ago this month and was reflecting back upon all the mistakes I made as a first time home buyer.

The first and biggest mistake I made was I trusted my real estate agent. Now I'm not saying all real estate agents are horrible but mine didn't really provide me with all the guidance she could of for someone who has been in the business for a long time. After going through the process, I'm not even sure why buyers even need agents with all the MLS sites out there now a days. As a result of trusting my agent, I ended up paying more for my unit than all the other owners by 10-20k.

The second mistake I made was using her mortgage broker referral. Turns out the lady I dealt with never presented me with any first time home buyer programs at all. Now I'm not sure if that's because I didn't qualify because of my income or not, but I find it hard to believe there wasn't any sort of program I could of utilized. On top of that, the difference in my monthly payment from the "Good faith estimate" to the actual HUD statement was about another 325 dollars plus an additional three thousand dollars at closing for a so called "no closing costs" loan. The bigger payment was composed of PMI and increased tax escrow. I won't waste your screen space with describing how happy I was on the day of my closing. Her defense for this was that the additional charges I incurred was a result of title insurance and bank attorney fees. Well, I'm sorry but as a first time home buyer, how am I supposed to know that?

The third mistake was I bought a condo in what's referred to as a non-warrantable building. The building had three units that were all redone by a developer so no one was living in it when I put my offer in. This eliminated a lot of potential banks to choose from.

The few things I did right was I purchased a condo in a very strong market that actually gained 11,000 dollars value in 11 months according to a bank appraisal I had a few weeks ago.

Another good decision I did was I didn't buy into those crazy adjustable mortgages. I'm not an economist but I know that I don't want my payment tied to how the feds think the economy is doing.

The last thing worth mentioning is I didn't take my real estate agent's referral for a home inspector and attorney. Even though they seemed legit, there was a clear conflict of interest.

Identity Theft Protection -- I Hope

After doing a few hours of research a couple weeks ago I signed up for a service that hopefully protects me from someone trying to ruin my credit. Here's the noteworthy bi product of my findings.

• Citi Bank offers probably one the more heavily marketed services but ultimately only gives you the ability to do something after someone has already done harm to your credit report. They also offer the standard features of access to fraud specialists, insurance, and access to credit reports from the three major bureaus.
• IdentityGuard offers a similar service but gives you the added ability to do something if you suspect your information has been stolen. I'm not sure exactly what it is because I'm not a member but it seems like a more of a reactive approach if you even aware of the situation.
  
• TrustedID is the service I chose to use personally. They offer the same standard set of features the above sites do but allegedly prevent creditors from opening a new account without contacting you first to verify more information that you provided to TrustedID. They achieve this by sending out requests to the three major credit bureau every 90 days alerting them to put a security flag on my account. Now I don't know for sure if this works because I haven't opened a new credit account yet but I will be refinancing my mortgage in late December so we'll see what happens. This was the only service I could find that offered the ability to this automatically. Of course, if you wanted to, you could send the requests yourself every 90 days but for 7.95 a month, I'll just have someone I can put the blame on if things get nasty take care of it. In addition, if you state laws allow, you can freeze your credit so that absolutely no one can open a new account unless it is unfrozen by you first.

If anyone knows of any new or better services I would love to know so I could further my due diligence.

On a side note, I never realized how much of a booming industry this has become. It's by all means a sad state of affairs that the credit bureaus make hundreds of millions of dollars off our personal information and they can't even implement basic security for the consumer. I'm not usually pro government regulation but this problem is starting to flirt with my tolerance for such a thing.

Online Net Worth Tracker

I've been searching the net for a few weeks now trying to find a decent way to store basic net worth information. I finally found something that works for me. A site called NetWorthIQ tracks your monthly net worth, provides previous month progress, and a graphical representation of your net worth progress in the form of a hyper linked "badge". I took the liberty of putting my "badge" on the front page. The other interesting feature the site offers is a report of all the users currently entering data into the site. This allows you to compare your net worth to others by certain specified categories such as age, occupation, etc.

The service is free and quite primitive. For you advanced users and accountants out there, it doesn't offer any fancy calculations other than a tally of a fixed number of common assets and liabilities. But for me, it offers a clean and simple way to track my monthly net worth progress.

Dollar songs are for suckers

I refuse to settle for 1 dollar songs from music services like iTunes. This is mainly because I use allofmp3.com where they charge you based on the size of the download. It also allows you to choose from a variety of formats and bit rate encoding.

A typical mp3 formatted song in 192 bit is about 10-15 cents. I'll keep the change thank you.

Allow me to introduce myself

The main goal of this blog will be to disclose my personal finance decisions and information in order to collect feedback and possibly provide some insight into other people's finances.

I decided to start a personal finance blog because I have always found investing fascinating even though it is not my day job. In addition, lately I have been very interested in other people's finance blogs and their commentary on related issues.

I've come to realize that my financial situation currently could use some work. So as stated above, this will be a documentary of sorts of how I go about not being a fool.