Archive: Business & Technology

Now that we're well into May, you might look around your house and yard and decide it's time for a little spring cleaning, if you're the sort of person who does that kind of thing. But even if you aren't, you can probably benefit from "sprucing up" another part of your life - your investment portfolio. Why? Because things change in your life. And while your investment and insurance products and strategies may have been appropriate for you at one time, that may no longer be the case.

So, once you decide to clean up your portfolio, what should you look for? Here are a few ideas to consider:

Late last year, something happened in this country that had not occurred since 1933: The nation's personal savings rate went negative. And we don't even have much company in our spendthrift ways: Our savings rate was the lowest in the industrialized world, according to the Organization of Economic Co-Operation and Development. Yikes!

What's behind this lack of savings? Many factors are involved, but some experts say that last year's extreme situation was caused, in part, by skyrocketing housing prices. Apparently, as home values have increased rapidly, homeowners feel more comfortable spending money, assuming that, if they ever need to, they can tap into the equity of their homes.

Pension in Trouble? Take Steps to Replace Income

In recent months, some well-known companies - including Verizon, Lockheed Martin, Motorola and IBM - have "frozen" their pension plans. If your company freezes its plan - or if you think it might do so in the future - you'll want to start thinking now of how to replace the potential lost income during your retirement years.

When a company freezes its pension plan, contributions or additional benefits will be discontinued during the freeze. Additional benefits typically would have increased each year of continued employment. Generally, when you retire or if you become disabled and can no longer work, for example, distributions will be paid to you based on your plan's distribution options.

Don't "Overstuff" Retirement Plan with Company Stock

Nearly a century ago, George Santayana, philosopher and poet, wrote: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." Sadly, this statement may be proving prophetic when it comes to the amount of company stock that people put into their retirement plans.

Here's one key event in the recent past that people seem not to remember: Enron employees who participated in their 401(k) plan had invested about 58 percent of their 401(k) assets in Enron stock when it lost almost all its value during 2001. But have things changed much since then? Consider this: In plans that allow company stock as an investment option, 46 percent of participants hold more than 20 percent of their account balance in their company stock, and one-sixth hold more than 80 percent of their account in employer stock, according to a study by the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College.

RSS LabelHave you ever wondered what the little orange lables are on the front page of the Lansing Star?  They link to special Web addresses that allow you to read the Star using a news reader.  Expert Sharon Housley explains the benefits and how these news feeds are used.

RSS also known as rich site summary or real simply syndication, arrived on the scene a number of years ago, but was only recently embraced by webmasters as a means to effectively syndicate content. RSS Feeds provide webmasters and content providers an avenue to provide concise summaries to prospective readers. Thousands of commercial web sites and blogs now publish content summaries in an RSS feed. Each item in the feed typically contains a headline; article summary and link back to the online article.

Benefit to the Webmaster
As the web has become more crowded webmasters have been striving to provide fresh and up to date content for their website visitors. Many webmasters have discovered they can easily utilize the information in RSS feeds to provide fresh web content.

Dr. Digit 'Splains It All

Let's talk about laundry.  When you have a pile of shirts, a pile of shorts, a neat pile of sheets and one of pillowcases it is easy to get dressed in the morning.  You get a shirt from the shirt shelf.  You know to look in your underwear drawer for the shorts.  It takes a minute to get dressed.  On another day all your clothes are together in a big hamper.  You find a shirt, search for a pair of pants...  you can't find a matching pair of socks!!!  It takes an hour before you are finished.

That laundry is a lot like your hard disk.  Files are stores in smaller pieces, clusters of data.  When all the parts of each file are next to each other the disk runs at optimum speed.  When the pieces of a file are strewn all over the disk it runs slower, because the drive has to find all the different parts and "put them on a shelf" whenever you load that file.

Dr. Digit 'Splains It AllDr. Digit 'Splains it All

As I watch other people use Windows programs I can't help but notice that they do it differently from me.  A lot of people click on the File menu, then click through the choices.  For example, to open a new file you would click File, then Open, then scroll through the choices until you find the file you want before clicking the "Open" button to load the file.

"What's wrong with that?" you may ask.  Nothing, really.  It works.  But here's what I do:  I press the Ctrl key and the O (the letter, not the zero) key at the same time, then type the beginning of the file name.  Windows presents me with a list of files that begin with what I typed.  I choose the right one and press Enter.  Is my way better?  Not especially, but it is a lot faster.

If you have several years to go until retirement, now is the right time to determine about how much annual income you can count on as a retiree. And if it looks like you might be coming up short, you'll want to take action soon.

Dr. Digit 'Splains It AllDr. Digit 'Splains It All

I got one of those indoor-outdoor thermometers that communicates with a sensor that is placed outside.  They both run on batteries, and communicate by radio waves.  I thought this was a pretty good arrangement.  I could put the main unit on my desk somewhere and not have cords dangling from it.  I could hang the sensor on a tree in the yard and wouldn't need a long wire to make it tell my desk unit how cold it is outside.

In one part of the manual it says to put two AAA alkaline batteries in the outside sensor.  So I did.  I got everything working, then went back to reading the manual for pleasure.  (You see, it doesn't take much to please me...)  Whoops!  I found a warning not to use alkaline batteries in sub-freezing temperatures, because they freeze.  It said not to worry, though, because when the weather warmed up the batteries would unfreeze and start working gain.  They suggested lithium batteries for cold climes, because they don't freeze until you get to -40 degrees Fahrenheit.

Now that we're in the midst of tax season, you may be anticipating a tax refund, if you haven't already received one. Of course, not everyone receives a refund, but, among those who do, the amount can be sizable. In fact, in 2005, the average tax refund was about $2,125. If you're going to get a refund, start planning now on how to use it. By making the right moves, you can help speed up your progress toward your financial goals.

So, what should you do with your refund? Here are a few ideas:

Dr. Digit 'Splains It AllDr. Digit 'Splains It All

E-mail is a great innovation that has made message delivery instantaneous and reasonably reliable.  An even more instantaneous way of communicating is Instant Messaging (IM), which allows users to type to each other over the Internet in real time.  IMs are a one to one medium in which two people can have a conversation.  They differ from on-line chat rooms in which many people can converse at once, with all members of the conversation able to see what the others are saying.

Instant messaging exploded on the scene in 1996 when Mirablis introduced the free ICQ ("I Seek You") software.  Anybody could download the software and immediately begin chatting with others located anywhere in the world.  Soon after that America Online introduced their own instant messaging for their members.  AOL's more than 20 million members could now communicate with anyone in  the world, including non-AOL users who set up AOL's free AIM ("AOL Instant Messenger") software.  This made AOL's IM protocol the most popular on the Internet.  Other IM utilities include Yahoo! Messenger and MSN Messenger.

Over the past several years, the phrase "multi-tasking" has gained popularity. And you know just what this expression means if you constantly juggle work and family demands. But you might not realize that you might have to use your skills at managing different outcomes in another area of your life: investing.

Specifically, you will likely need to invest for both short-term and long-term goals. And you'll have to do it at the same time.