This week on @blueleaf we posted a number of articles on personal finance, investing, and trends in the American economy. My personal favorite this week is “How Personal Finance Changes As You Begin To See Success” from The Simple Dollar. It highlights that when you transition from being concerned about your finances to carefully managing them, you stop worrying about money and begin using it as a tool.

Is The McMansion Dead? – Darwin’s Finance

The Pros and Cons Of Being Self-Employed – Brip Blap

Hedge Funds Lag The Simplest Portfolios – Monevator

Equities: The Shift From Active To Passive – Felix Salmon

Yes, You Will Get Social Security – Get Rich Slowly

Bankruptcy: America Is Filing Like Its 1999! - Good Financial Cents

5 Easily Avoidable Financial Mistakes Young People Make – Green Panda Treehouse

Is Low Wage China Disappearing? - Project Syndicate

Planning To Rollover Your 401(k) Into An IRA? – The Digetari Life

The Downside Of Owning REITs – Million Dollar Journey

Paying Taxes On Earned Income – Consumer Boomer

Money Mistakes That Mostly Women Make – Moneyning

Would You Rather Do What You Love Or Be Paid More? – Financial Highway

New York Lowers 529 Plan Fees – NYT Bucks

Can The Obama Administration’s New Stimulus Plan Revive The Housing Market? - Money Morning

How Increased Immigration Would Help Fix The Economy – Felix Salmon

How Personal Finance Changes As You Begin To See Success – The Simple Dollar

It’s Still A Good Idea To Buy A House In This Economy – Free From Broke

Getting Rich Over Time – Money Crush

Have a great weekend!

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This week on @blueleaf we posted two articles on loving your career, “Love Or Money – Which Do You Work For?” and “Money Matters But Money Isn’t Everything.”

My viewpoint as a college student: The way I see it, if I don’t fall in love with my future career (or at least like it), I’ll have less money for retirement in the end. The more I will hate my career, the more I will spend on lavish vacations and conveniences to make my time away from work more fruitful. The more stressed out I will be. The more stressed out my family will be. The more I’ll spend on shopping, make-up, designer clothes, foot rubs, therapy, and who knows what else? Choosing wisely early on will be a good investment.

Below is a round-up of the articles we posted this week on @blueleaf. Enjoy!

Why I Don’t Chase The Highest Interest Rate - Consumerism Commentary

Why Are College Students Stressing About The Economy – The Financial Blogger

Love Or Money – Which Do You Work For? – Fiscal Geek

How To Beat Inflation - Cash Money Life

Fiscal Austerity and “Third World America” – Baseline Scenario

TIPS Vs. Nominal Treasury Bonds – Oblivious Investor

The Tax Consequences Of Lucky Breaks – Bucks

What Makes The News? Not Accuracy! – Barel Karsan

How To Get Ahead Financially As A College Student - Grad Money Matters

Top Mistakes Young Families Make – Bible Money Matters

Thoughts About Marriage Roundup – Personal Finance By The Book

Money Matters But Money Isn’t Everything – Moneyning

Why Americans Can’t Afford To Die – Go Banking Rates

How Much Long Term Care Insurance Should You Have? - Go To Retirement

Trillion Dollar Public Pension Shortfall – Hope To Prosper

What You Need To Know About Stock Market Volatility – Consumer Boomer

Who Would Make The Best Use Of Billions – Bill Gates Or The US Govt? – Darwin’s Finance

How To Go Broke In The Market – The Motley Fool

Why Invest In Bonds? – Free From Broke

How Credit Unions Differ From Banks - Cash Money Life

Have a great weekend!

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This week on @blueleaf, we included a ton of great articles (including some videos and other postings) within our daily four handpicked favorites. An article that we are particularly fond of this week is an editorial in the New York Times that discusses how investing in low fee mutual funds provided the best returns in the past year. This article can be found in the first link below.

Investing Made Easy – If Only – NY Times

Calculating Net Worth: Should Home Values Be Included? – Frugal Dad

Should You Leave An Inheritance To Your Children? - Personal Finance By The Book

Retirement Plans: Help For Small Firms – Kiplinger

How Overconfidence Hurts Portfolio Performance – Kiplinger

Vanguard Expands Target Date Funds To Young Investors – Consumerism Commentary

Higher Education Can Have A Negative Effect On Your Level Of Wealth – Bible Money Matters

Why The Economy Is Not Relevant To Investing – Million Dollar Journey

Small Business Tax Deductions – Wealth Pilgrim

How To Set Your Child’s Allowance – Bucks

Building Up Savings Rates Is A Life Long Process – Five Cent Nickel

An Unhappy Birthday For Social Security – Kiplinger

The Fed Can’t Print Jobs – Kudlow’s Money Politics

Taking The Lump Sum Option On Your Pension – Good Financial Cents

Statistical Shocker: S&P 500 Performs Best When The Economy Is Shrinking – Peridot Capitalist

Why Won’t “Fiscal Hawks” Discuss The Real Issues? - Baseline Scenario

Avoid These Financial Products – Bargaineering

What Near Record Low Treasury Yield Means – Good Financial Cents

What Kind Of Insurance Do I Need To Have? – Smart On Money

CPI Shows Inflation May Be  A Bigger Problem Than The Fed Thinks It Is – Money Morning

Funny Stock Symbols – My Journey To Millions

Have a great weekend!

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It’s Friday the 13th!!!!!

My personal favorite article this week is “What Is Retirement?” by Get Rich Slowly. It introduces the concept of “semi-retirement” which is a more likely future for many (and a common state that many retirees find themselves in today.) Defining what you would like your retirement to look like is one of the first steps in planning it.

Check out the rest of this week’s articles below:

How To Survive Financial Betrayal – Five Cent Nickel

Student Loan Debt Surpasses Credit Card Debt – Consumerism Commentary

The Pros and Cons Of Hiring A Professional Tax Preparer – Good Financial Cents

The Most Important Fund Criteria – Motley Fool

Will Social Security Be There When You Retire? – Out Of Your Rut

Vanguard vs. Fidelity – Which Funds Are Better? – My Personal Finance Journey

Refinancing? 7 Things You Need To Know – Devil In The Details

How Expiring Bush Tax Cuts Affect Taxpayers – Cash Money Life

What To Look At When Investing In Fixed Income – Green Panda Tree House

Why Personal Finance “Experts” Continue Giving Worthless Advice – I Will Teach You To Be Rich

Falling Rates For Certificates Of Deposit – Bucks

Are IPO’s A Good Investment Option? – My Personal Finance Journey

FAQs On The Child-Care Tax Credit – Kiplinger

Secrets To Maximizing Social Security – Kiplinger

Investment Psychology: Top 5 Ways Investors Go Broke – The Digetari Life

What Is Retirement? – Get Rich Slowly

India: On The Path To Double Digit Growth? – Money Morning

401(k) Match: Is This Employee Perk Going Away Or Coming Back? – Darwin’s Finance

Mutual Fund Basics – Pt Money

Kiddie Roth - Joe Taxpayer

Have a great weekend!

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This week on @blueleafcom, we have posted many introductory articles to investing: articles on tax refunds, on emergency funds, on cost reduction, on the traditional IRA, and on investment strategy for complete beginners.

We hope not only to help those who already know what they are doing (and would like to do it quicker, better, and more precisely), but also those who need a bit of hand-holding along the way. Our product has (and will very soon feature more) tools for people in both these categories, and the literature we select for you each week reflects just that.

Simplify your lifetime investments.

Some excellent weekend reading can be found below.

What Will Retirement Look Like For Younger Generations? – Frugal Dad

Got A Refund? 10 Ideas To Spend Your Tax Refund – Stupid Cents

The Feds Options To Jump-Start The Economy – Kiplinger

You Need An Emergency Fund: Expect The Unexpected – Moolanomy

How To Combine Finances For Couples – Consumerism Commentary

Guaranteed Annuity Income: Is It Really Safe? - Oblivious Investor

Low Interest Rates Do Not Make Homes Affordable – Wisebread

Senior Workers Outnumber Teenage Workers For The First Time – Financial Samurai

Retire At 70? Screw That With These Helpful Tips – Studenomics

Is A Liberal Arts Education Worth It? – The Digetari Life

Investment Strategy For Beginner Investors – Free From Broke

In Defense Of The Traditional IRA – Free From Broke

Account Hierarchy Priority Order - My Personal Finance Journey

Investment Basics: What Are Options And Futures - Provident Planning

Can’t Control The Markets? Try Controlling The Costs - Everything Finance

Is Financial Compatibility Important When Choosing A Life Partner? – Money Ning

Should You Overestimate Your Retirement Needs? – Pt Money

Fallacy of Other People’s Money – Fiscal Geek

Paying The Price: Time To Reassess How Fund Managers Are Rewarded – The Economist

Investors Should Be Cautious Of ‘Safe’ Funds – The Independent

Have a great weekend!

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This week on @blueleafcom, we included plenty of good reads for the weekend. One long article too: “The Estate Tax: Ninety Years And Counting,” which includes a history of the estate tax and the motivations behind it, directly from the IRS.

Why read it? Well, perhaps your investments all go incredibly well. And perhaps, as we hope, you do save enough to retire comfortably. That’s what we all want, isn’t it? And we don’t exactly hear anyone say, “I wish I was so rich I qualified for the estate tax.”  But we at blueleaf.com com want you to be prepared for success too, not just tragedy. Because, well, we want you to succeed. The estate tax is not as high as you may think if your financial planning all goes well throughout your lifetime.

My personal favorite this week is “Top Mistakes Young Families Make.”

What Is Better From A Tax Perspective: Roth IRA or 401(k) – Brip Blap

How To Manage Retirement Savings – Good Financial Cents

What Are Your Financial Motivations – Intelligent Speculator

The Estate Tax: Ninety Years and Counting - IRS

Beware Of The Pitfalls Of Too Much Information – Kiplinger

Elusive Low Correlations – Seeking Alpha

How To Pick Stocks In The New Normal Economy – Money Morning

2011 Tax Brackets: What Will Change And How Should We Plan For It? – Oblivious Investor

10 Reasons Why We May Not See Anything Less Than A trillion Dollar Deficit For Decades To Come – End Of The American Dream

Different Types of Bankruptcy – Good Financial Cents

Indianomics – Project Syndicate

Smallest Tax Refund – My Journey To Millions

How To Avoid Investment Fraud: Don’t Be A “Madoff” Victim – The Digitari Life

Should I Walk Away From My Mortgage? – Frugal Dad

Top Mistakes Young Families Make – Bible Money Matters

Is A Graduate Degree Worthwhile Or Worthless? – Consumerism Commentary

Dollar Cost Averaging Helps Eliminate Emotion and Market Risk – Free From Broke

Tax Benefits Of Homeownership- Three Reasons Its Overrated – Out Of Your Rut

Why You Should Keep Your Financial Advisor – Five Cent Nickel

Have a great weekend!

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Do you invest in stocks? Most people would say no; they say, “we only invest in mutual funds.” And for most people that answer is wrong. Or at the very least, dangerously misguided.

That’s because the mutual funds and ETFs that we invest in usually have most, or  sometimes all, of their assets in stocks. It means that, while you personally may not be actively picking stocks, someone or some computer is. Those choices and how (un)diversified they are can give you an unexpected wallop when you can least afford it.

The good news is that by law, any single mutual fund (or a hedge fund, or anyone else for that matter) can’t own more than 5% of the stock of a single company without at least making a filing with the SEC.  So, for example, your mutual fund is prohibited from owning more than 5% of the outstanding shares of, say, Lululemon. That means in the worst-case scenario, you won’t have more the 5% of your money in any one company. While even that concentration may be too much for some, for most of us that is adequate protection from an individual company imploding.

However, if you mix investments in individual stocks with owning mutual funds, or if you own a handful of similar mutual funds, you may not be as diversified as you think you are.  And this could have dire consequences. For example, if you were unwittingly concentrated in the financial services industry in 2008 or the auto industry in 2009, your portfolio would have taken a wallop – even though you thought you were diversified by holding mutual funds.

The mutual fund companies have to file reports with the SEC’s EDGAR database that show their top holdings on a quarterly basis. However, instead of looking around in EDGAR, you can use Yahoo! Finance to input a mutual fund ticker and find out the top ten holdings, and the fund’s total assets across various industries. For example, you can see this data for the Fidelity Magellan fund. You can input other mutual fund tickers in the upper-right of the page.

You can collect this data for all of your mutual funds and put it into a spreadsheet program (like Microsoft Excel) to calculate your overall exposure for your portfolio – just remember that you must weight each fund by the percentage of your total assets that are in each fund. That way you can find out if you’re concentrated in a particular industry, or even a particular stock, even though you may own many different mutual funds.

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We just figured, why waste time and money writing a million posts when we can just use our powers of selectivity and link you to all the right places? We’ve got to spend the time making our product spectacular. We leave the rest to the pros.

This week @blueleafcom, we posted the following articles. “Barriers To Earning More Money” is my personal favorite.

How Much House Can You Afford – Money Smart Life

Saving America’s Middle Class – The Return of Frugality – Frugal Dad

Barriers To Earning More Money – Studenomics

The High Cost of Being Single - Five Cent Nickel

P/E Ratios – Consumerism Commentary

Effects On The Recession On America’s Personal Finances – My Dollar Plan

The Mental Anchor Of Money Mistakes – NYT Bucks

The Future of Social Security – Five Cent Nickel

The Spill May Be Over, But BP Sports Nasty Wounds – Motley Fool

The Five Minute Rule – Bargaineering

Need A Mortgage? Don’t Get Pregnant – New York Times

Developing Multiple Streams Of Income – The Digitari Life

Senate Is Set To Extend Aid To The Jobless – New York Times

A New Age In The History of Energy – Money Morning

Wealth Preservation Strategies Of The Rich – Monevator

Watch The Clock Of Investment Cycles – Financial Times

The New Financial Regulation Law And Your Money – Consumerism Commentary

Got Company Stock Options? Here’s How They Work - The Digitari Life

How Banks Make Money – Cash Money Life

Test Your Investment Instincts – Kiplinger

Have a great weekend!

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We’ve been really well-behaved, just like this kid. No joke links, no pranks. We’ve gotten down to business. The links below have awesome advice and novel ways to think about financial freedom and how to take control of your finances. Enjoy.

The Uses and Abuses of Economic Ideology – Project Syndicate

A Roosevelt Moment for American Banks – Project Syndicate

Four Fund Metrics That Hurt Your Returns – Amateur Asset Allocator

How Much Can I Afford For a House? – Wealth Pilgrim

Buffet Doesn’t See Double Dip – The Guru Investor

What Are The Leading Economic Indicators – Good Financial Cents

Bank Error In Your Favor? No Such Thing – Bargaineering

The New Doom – New York Observor

How Do You Define Financial Freedom? – Get Rich Slowly

What’s Going On With The Estate Tax? – Good Financial Cents

Are Big Banks Doomed? Look At These Survey Results - I Will Teach You To Be Rich

Dear China: You’re Making Me Nervous… - Wall Street Oasis

The Economics of A College Degree – Reuters

The Maes & Macs; Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae, Ginnie Mae, Sally Mae – Bargaineering

Learn To Live With Conflicts of Interest - Bucks

Why Mortgage Rates Vary So Much – Bucks

Ignore Generic Financial Advice - Bucks

Calculating Real Estate Investor Return – Oblivious Investor

Coverdell Savings Account Tax Break Expiring – Bargaineering

The Myth That Risk Goes Away Over Time – Felix Salmon

Have a great weekend!

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One of the reasons we founded Blueleaf is that it’s simply too much work to really understand your money and manage it properly. We’re not talking about your day to day spending, though that’s not easy. We’re talking about the long-term, about how small things today make a big difference down the road and about how seemingly big things today may not be so important as the media hype machine may lead you to believe.

We’re setting out to change that by making money obvious, by telling you “this means that” in plain language, and providing complex information in simple visualizations so that you can really understand where you’re headed and what you need to do at a glance.

Allocation – teaching the lowly pie graph a new language

Allocation – How much money do you have in stocks, bonds and cash across all your accounts? It tells you more than most people expect or understand. That’s because all most people have ever seen is a pie graph without any context. That is all that most systems show you. Yet, that humble pie chart is the Rosetta Stone for your financial future.

Your allocation is the biggest driver of your financial returns, much more important than picking any particular stock or mutual fund. Your allocation determines what kinds of returns you can expect over the long run and what you shouldn’t expect. It determines how much risk you’re taking, answering the question “How much money could I lose this year (or over the next 5 years)?” Along with just a few other key pieces of information, your allocation will help tell you if you’re going to be able to retire, or send your kids to the college of their choice, or buy that boat before you’re 50. To us at Blueleaf, that “Can I retire?” question seems kind of important, and yet, why hasn’t someone, somewhere made it obvious what that lowly pie chart means?

The truth is that many have tried. There has been more written on asset allocation by well meaning academics and financial planners that any investor could read in a lifetime. And that is part of the problem. There are millions of words written about allocation in general but there is precious little about how to apply the academic work on asset allocation to our personal portfolios, our personal risk tolerances, and our personal goals.

And that is what matters to us at Blueleaf. Who wants to make our money a hobby or part-time job? That’s what it seems like it will take to sift through all that information, learn what is relevant for us then do the math manually to figure get the answers for ourselves.

So we thought, “Why not just let money speak for itself?” Why not give your money a voice and put it on stage so it speaks to you with power and clarity? Let Blueleaf do the work to learn your language so you can understand what your money is saying to you about your financial future. And that’s what we’re working to do. Blueleaf is working to teach your money to speak your language, not the other way around. We think you’ve got enough to do already.

Interested in what we’re building? Request an invitation to our free preview. And follow this blog for more to come.

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