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Ever since I started trying to go cash only I have naturally started to collect more and more coin. I thought that it might be an interesting experiment to see what the average age of each type of coin I come across is. My theory is that the more a coin is worth the older the average age will be. I think that pennies will have a relatively short longevity.

So far I have collected 69 coins over the past couple of weeks. I have calculated the average mint date for these coins to be 1993.12.

Here is a breakdown of each particular coin:

• Quarter 17 coins, average mint date 1995.18
• Dime 18 coins, average mint date 1994.39
• Nickel 9 coins, average mint date 1987.11
• Penny 25 coins, average mint date 1992.96

As you can see, my hypothesis is clearly wrong. Nickels and Pennies had the oldest average age of all my coins. This could be due to the fact that my sample size is so small. I will try and periodically update my coin count so that we can see what age of coins are circulating through my possession. In the end I think that I will be proven right.

I have been meaning to take my bike down to the Colonnade bike park in Seattle for quite some time. Yesterday it was nice enough and I actually had the time to do it. I had a general idea of the location which made it quite easy to find. I crossed the University bridge coming from the UW area and then took Boylston Ave E over to the park.

I had seen pictures of the park, but to see it in person is quite impressive. It looked like a ton of work had gone into the park. Colonnade park is a mountain bike skills park that was built under the I-5 elevated freeway. The park is 2 acres and will cover about 1.5 miles of trail when it is completed. Phase 1 is completed and Phase 2 is currently in progress. From what I can tell, Phase 1 is more of a beginner course with some challenges thrown in for the more advanced rider. Phase 2 looks like it is set up as a free ride course with lots of wooden features.

It had been about 10 months since I had ridden any sort of mountain bike trail so I was a bit rusty. I started at the top of the Phase 1 trail and made my way down. It seemed like the trails were well put together. If you stayed on the main path it was pretty flat and straight forward. You could also choose to venture to the side to attempt to ride skinnies and rock obstacles. If you avoid these obstacles it is a fairly smooth ride to the bottom.

From first glance, my only gripe with the Phase 1 trail is that the switchbacks have too small of a turn radius. This may be because I am out of practice, but for a supposed beginner trail I thought the hairpin turns were a bit difficult. It probably didn’t help that the turns had loose gravel and no bank to help out. I think that a beginner would get frustrated by this. The other issue that I had was that the terraces of the trail were fairly high up. I can imagine a beginner coming up to some obstacle and losing balance and falling over one of the terraces onto the gravel trail 4 feet below or some rock feature. I don’t think that would go over well.

One think that I did like was the skill building area at the bottom. It had miniature versions of many different trail features one might expect when mountain biking. They had some short log rides and teeter totters as well as whoop-de-doo bumps. The other cool thing about the park is that it is covered by the freeway. This way when it rains you still have a dry place to go riding.

I wish I had a little more time to explore so that I could practice a bit more, but I wanted to get home before it got dark.

To see more details on the park, check out the official website.

So I am all signed up for my online certificate program in Project Management through UC Davis. I am still waiting for my book to be delivered to me, but so far the course looks like it should be pretty interesting. For the first “assignment,” we all had to introduce ourselves on the class forum. It looks like a fairly diverse group. Also from what it sounds like I am one of the few who doesn’t have much experience in actual project management. That could also be because I am probably the youngest one in the class. That is fine by me though.

The syllabus looks pretty straight forward. 10% participation, 40% homework, and 50% for the final. One nice thing about the final is that it is open book, open note. Sometimes that works against you though, because the test is made 10x harder because of this. I think that I should fare fairly well in this class as long as I can stay on top of things. One interesting thing about the format of the class is that it is self paced. Therefore, it is plausible that classmates could all be at totally different parts of the class at different times. I think that this may provide some confusion to the message board, but I’m sure we will be able to sift through it.

I think this course will start to come together a little bit more once I get my textbook. I will write more once it comes in and I get a chance to look at it.

I haven’t posted about a company that I really like in a while, so I thought that tonight would be a good time to post a small blurb about a company that I think has enormous upwards potential. The company that I am talking about is Metavante. It is fairly likely that you have never heard of this company because you have never dealt with them directly. It is probably the case that you have.

Metavante is one of the largest bill pay providers in the United States. What is Bill Pay? These days, many banks offer free online banking. Free online bill pay is one of the main attractions of online banking. When you as the consumer initiate an online bill payment, the funds are sent to the bill payment provider who then turns those funds into a paper check made out to whomever was specified. The check is then mailed to the recipient. Metavante is one of the premier bill pay providers in the US. The reason that I know this is because our credit union receives about 30+ checks per day from them. Considering our total net deposits is only $500 million, that is a lot of checks. Of the bill pays that come through to our main branch, I would say about 90% of them are from Metavante.

The company does not do just online bill pay though. They offer a wide range of other products and services for their customers. Some of their products and services include:

• Banking and trust solutions
• Business transformation services
• EFT solutions
• ePayment solutions
• Image solutions
• Payment network solutions

I think that online banking has yet to reach a full audience. There should still be a lot more room to grow within this industry. As people become more and more reliant on using online banking, they will be more likely to send an ePayment rather than writing and mailing out a check. The more people that use these online services, the more money Metavante could bring in. Because of this, I see excellent growth potential in this company over the coming years.

I make these recommendations all without looking at the company’s financials. I hope to dig deeper into those sometime in the near future. The company just went public back in November 2nd, 2007. The stock currently trades at $22.94 with a market cap of $2.742 B. They currently have a P/E ratio of about 69, and about 64% of the company is owned by institutions. If the company performs well in the near term, this should allow plenty of room for the institutions to purchase up more shares and drive up the price. Their revenues are about $1.598 billion for the year, which is a 6.25% increase from 2006 levels. For the year 2007, Metavante had profits of 49.451 million, which was a major drop from 2006. This was due largely to the $142.242 million outflow due to special items.

Tonight I decided to go ahead and sign up for online classes through UC Davis. I am going to be doing a certificate program through the university. The certificate program that I am doing is project management. I think that this certificate should help me advance my career. I think these types of classes are typically included in the MBA curriculum. I don’t think I am quite ready to pursue an MBA just yet. The other nice thing is that my employer is going to pay for the majority of it. Starting after this quarter I will be eligible to receive $2,000 in reimbursements each year. At the completion of the courses I should be able to sit for the PMP certificate examination.

Here are the main objectives of the program:

• Prepare for the Project Management Institute’s Project Management Professional Certification Examination
• Understand the fundamental concepts and theory of project management
• Analyze projects for cost, time, scope, risk and quality
• Understand how to utilize the control elements common to all projects you manage for maximum results
• Apply quality management methods to effectively organize staff and lead a successful project team

To me this seems like it will all be applicable in the workplace as I start to get more and more responsibilities. I plan on periodically making entries about my experience in this program.

I think that the whole online learning experience should be interesting. I really don’t know exactly how everything is going to work. I would imagine that the majority would be book based with online quizzes and papers. Although online education may seem a bit odd, I value the amount of flexibility that it will be able to provide me. I also think that a certificate through UC Davis will be much more valuable than something through the University of Phoenix or some other commercial venture. Did you know that the University of Phoenix is a publicly traded company? Something about getting an education from a company with profit in mind doesn’t quite rub me the right way. Maybe I am just overly skeptical.

Assuming I take one class each quarter, the whole program should take two years to complete. In that time I should be able to give a very accurate portrayal of how the program works. Hopefully this will inspire others to follow the same path as me. Here is a link to the program. The first course cost $650 to enroll. It is normally $600, but I signed up late. My books for the course are going to run me about $28 with shipping.

Stay tuned for more updates on how this exciting venture goes!

After 5 years of having an account with RBC Dain Rauscher, I have finally closed it out. I realized that at this point in time having a full service broker wasn’t right for me. I first opened the account when I was 18 because I wanted to invest in some stock. The first and only stock transaction I did with them was purchase 20 shares of Microsoft. I was pretty excited when I made the trade, but that soon changed when I found out what the trading commission for it was. It cost about $65 to make the trade. When you factor that out, you find that the stock will have to rise $6-$7 before you make any money. That made me pretty upset, but I didn’t sell because then I would have eaten $130. So I hung onto it ever since.

I got really excited when they paid their one-time $3 dividend. I was mostly excited because the dividend ($3 x 20 = $60) was almost enough to cover my commission to purchase the stock. I never really paid a whole lot of attention to the account because there was just one stock in it. A year or so later I was looking at a statement that came in the mail. When I looked at it I noticed that there was nothing in the cash account. I knew that there should have been at least $60 in there plus a smattering of small dividends plus a bit of interest from the cash account. This was a bit upsetting to say the least. The next day I called in to talk to “my broker.” Of course the broker was not available, so I end up getting passed around from secretary to secretary and finally end up with someone who sounded like they hadn’t worked there too long. I told her what happened and she said that she would look into it and give me a call back.

After about three days of playing phone tag during my lunch I finally found out what had happened. Apparently if you do not have over $100,000 in your account you are charged a $100 annual maintenance fee. When you have only ~$500 in your account that comes out to be a 20% deduction. She did seem excited to tell me though that since I only had ~$70 in cash assets in the account they only charged me that and wrote off the rest. How nice of them.

After this incident I decided to close out my account and transfer it to Fidelity. For some reason I got charged $112.98 for the transfer. I guess that is the closing fees associated with closing out an account. That seems kind of ridiculous for transferring 20 shares of stock. Between the $65 purchase price, the $112.98 close out fee and the $20 sale price, I am going to have to sell Microsoft for $9.90 more than what I bought it for to break even.

I guess there are a few lessons to be learned from this:

1. High priced full service brokers only make sense if you have a ton of money
2. If you are doing all the research to buy and sell stocks, you shouldn’t be paying a premium to do it.
3. Know the fee structure of a full service broker before you get into one. Otherwise the fees will eat you alive.

Overall I think it was a decent learning experience. Buying that first 20 shares is what really got me interested in trading. I don’t think that I would be as active into my trading today if I hadn’t started out this way. Although it may look like a wasted $270, but in the end I learned a lot about how these companies work. If you have a lot of money and just want someone to do all the work for you, a full service broker may be right for you. If you are just starting out and don’t mind doing a bit of research, then a low priced broker like Fidelity, Scottrade or Schwab would likely be the better option.

This post is going to look at some of the highest dividend paying stocks at this point in time. There are a few reasons that I have decided to look into this. First of all, my dad always suggests stocks to me because of the dividends that they pay. “You should get WXYY. They have a 4% dividend, which is much higher than you can get in a CD.” Of course just because a stock pays a dividend doesn’t mean that it is going to rise. Second, father was on the WAMU bandwagon, especially when they were paying 10%+. Look at that company now.

There is a big reason that I am skeptical of companies with high dividends. Back in 2006 I bought a little bit of stock in a company called Fieldstone Investment Corporation. They were one of those REIT companies that ended up collapsing. Anyway I initially got into the company in 2006 thinking that it might make a good play, especially with such a high dividend. At the time I think it was paying at least 15%.

As you can see from the image above, my experience with them did not go entirely according to plans. All in all I spend $1177.40 on the stock, and ended up selling for $610.03 over a course of less than a year. This was coming from a company with a 15% dividend. Who would have thought? All in all I made $98.70 in dividends from them. That makes my sell price look a bit better, but definitely a far cry from perfect.

When choosing companies to look at, I am not going to look at the companies that pay the most out per share, but I am actually going to look for the companies that have the highest dividend yield. By clicking on the thumbnail, you can see the companies with the highest dividend rates that traded for at least $10.

I did another chart where I looked at companies that were trading for at least $25 and were paying at least 10%. Here are the top 15. Click the thumbnail to see who made the cut.

So the goal for this experiment is to see whether or not these stocks beat the market, and maintain their dividend yield. My prediction is that either the dividends will be cut, or the price of each stock will drop. I think the reason that these rates are so high is that the stock has dropped quite a bit since the last dividend was paid. Since we have no idea what the next dividend will be, we have to go by what the most recent one said. I think that this produced abnormal yields.

I bought the latest version of Microsoft Money a few months ago. I believe it is the 2008 edition, but it doesn’t say on the site that it is. I was going to buy it in the store, but I decided to instead just download it from the website. Well, you can’t just download it. You have to pay for it. They offer different tiers from $19.99 - $59.99. I think those are the after rebate prices though.

One may want to note the fine print for Microsoft Money Essentials ($19.99). “For Money Essentials, online services are available for one (1) year after activation of Microsoft Money Essentials or September 1st, 2008, whichever is earlier.” If you were planning on getting essentials and using online services, I would recommend waiting for next year’s version to come out. This way you will actually be able to use the online services for more than just a few short months.

I ended up getting Microsoft Money Plus Deluxe. It is advertised for $29.99, but that is including a $20 rebate that you have to send it. I forgot to send mine in until it had expired. I sent it in anyways, because I figured that the most I could lose would be $.41 (it was a forever stamp) for postage. A few short weeks later I had a $20 check from Microsoft waiting for me.

As far at the program as a whole goes, it is decent but leaves a lot to be desired. For starters, it is the same Microsoft Money that we have all been using for the past ten years. Nothing has really changed that much at all. I guess there isn’t a whole lot that you can change and add for a personal finance program, but it would be nice to see a few updated for my $30.

The interface is a lot cleaner and more modern looking, so I will definitely give them a pat on their back for the effort there.

…well I had written a bunch more, but for some reason it was unable to post and now it has deleted a bunch of it. At this point I don’t really feel like redoing it. Maybe later I will fill in the rest of what I had to say.

This morning I read an article on Yahoo Finance by Charles Wheelan, who authored the book “The Naked Economist.” The article was titled “High Fuel Costs Could Spur a New Rationalism.”

In summary the article basically says that people will make economic decisions based on how prices affect them. Right now the price of gasoline is the primary driver to consumer’s economic choices. He says that as the price of gas continues to rise consumers will no longer find it rational to commute long distances to work because the cost to them is so great. Wheelan predicts that as the cost of gas rises consumers will be forced to make economic decisions about where to live, work and how to commute.

Wheelan suggests four changes that could possibly be made in order to cut one’s energy spending.

• Move into a smaller house. Having a large house out in the country may be nice, but energy prices will soon have you feeling not so happy about your grand palace. When you consider the costs associated with heating and cooling your home as well as the gas driving to and from work you might start to see your energy bill skyrocket.
• Businesses may make smarter location choices. Although city commercial space is pricey, a firm will have a better chance of attracting quality employees if they are located in a central locale. “Suppose you’re considering two jobs: One is in a building three blocks from the commuter train station, and the other is in an office complex 21 miles away from anything except cornfields. How is that decision affected by $6 gas?”
• People may start moving back to the cities. Many people often consider cities to be polluted and dangerous places, but the opposite is starting to become more true. “Both Chicago and New York City had the fewest number of homicides in 2007 than in any year since the mid-1960s.” Cities also tend to have more options when it comes to entertainments as well. They tend to have more sports teams and performing arts centers to name a few. They also tend to have more universities located nearby as well. Downtown Seattle has three major universities to choose from. Larger cities would likely have even more options.

Although I currently live inside the city limits of Seattle, I will take all of these factors into consideration when my lease comes due here at the end of August. Since I use transit to get to work, the cost of driving to downtown isn’t really a factor, but instead the cost of getting to transit is more of a concern. Here is what I will be considering when I move.

• Cost of the rental unit
• Size of the rental unit
• Distance to nearest reliable bus
• Distance to girlfriend’s place
• Parking availability
• Time it takes to get to work from the rental unit

After considering all these factors, I might end up choosing a place that costs a little bit more in rent because the cheapness of another unit could be outweighed by the cost of gas to travel from one place to the next. I would also pay a premium to be close to a reliable and quick bus.

I graduated from college almost exactly a year ago. On the day of my graduation I thought that I would never go back to school again. Based on the current job market and job descriptions that I have seen, it seems to make more and more sense to go back to school and take more classes. While I don’t think I am ready to go for an MBA, I do think there would be some value for me to get some professional certificates.

There are many Universities out there that offer certificates for the working person that can be completed fully online. This is what I plan to do. It makes more sense for me to do it this way because of my work hours. They tend to vary widely based upon how the day goes at work. Because of this I would probably have trouble making it to a 6:30 class on a consistent basis. Therefore, I think online correspondence classes would work out best for me. The two schools that I have looked at the closest are the University of Virginia and UC-Davis. These schools seemed to have the best online setup for the courses that I was interested. The other thing that I liked was that they were a traditional University rather than a University of Phoenix that seems to be more of a business than a University. I also looked at the University of Villanova’s online course offerings, and theirs seemed to look more like a business than a traditional University even though that is what they are. UMass also has a lot of online choices, but none seemed to fit with what I wanted to do.

So my next step is going to be to look into when I can start. It appears that I can start just about any quarter and take as many classes as I feel like per quarter. I will probably just go with one class per quarter so that I don’t get too overwhelmed with everything else. After that I need to look into whether or not my employer will reimburse me for this. The certificate will cost about $5,500 plus books and other fees to complete. My employer will reimburse up to $2,000 per year. That would be a very nice help if that would work out. So I think my goal for this week is to see if my employer will compensate for it and then go from there.