The Frugal Duchess hosted this week’s Carnival of Personal Finance, and highlighted one of my posts! Check it out. It’s been a while since I’ve submitted to a Carnival of any sort, so it’s great to be a part of this one.
So this week, the Fed cut rates again. Honestly, I think I’m becoming a bit immune to it. When it first started, I found the dropping interest rates on my savings accounts incredibly frustrating. Now I just sort of shrug. As I’m writing this, my rate at ING Direct hasn’t yet dropped, though their CD rates have dropped. Seeing as the 6 month CD is at 2.5% and the savings account is at 2.75%, I’d say that savings account interest rate is very likely to drop soon. Otherwise, what would the incentive be to put money into a CD at all?
I have a CD that will come due in January and just got a message about that from ING Direct. In previous months, they had been offering a .1% bump in the interest rate if you rolled the CD into a new CD. That offer was not made this go around.
Like I said, in previous months, this would be frustrating me, but instead I just sort of shrug my shoulders and keep saving. Earning any interest is better than no interest at all.
Megan is a 30-something government employee in the Washington, DC area. She got interested in Personal Finance when she got out of college and realized that her paycheck wasn’t going to go as far as she had hoped. Since starting this blog, she has managed to buy a house and make a solid start on her retirement goals, and hopes to help others do the same. Here is her story:
In 2007, I was a gainfully employed 20-something with no debt but not a lot of knowledge about personal finance. It was a co-worker’s comment about Roth IRAs that sent me to the internet, searching for information. It was then that I realized that I really didn’t know a whole lot about personal finance and that my current financial situation was due a lot to inherent frugal tendencies, generous family members, a fear of debt, and good luck. While that was working for me, clearly I needed a better plan.
While I had no debt, I was also pretty much living paycheck to paycheck and not worrying about going over budget (I say this as if I had a real budget) because I had an emergency fund set aside to cover any overages.
Except that’s not what an emergency fund is for.
So I did a lot of research, read a lot of blogs, and decided that I needed a plan. I needed to budget. I needed to know what I was spending my money on. I needed to prepare for the future.
I decided to create a blog not only to make myself accountable to others but also to share the knowledge that I gained along the way. I’ve learned so much from my fellow bloggers, and I hope that my readers can find something useful in what I have to share as well.
oh man, yeah that’s stinky 🙁 i’m actually in the other end of the boat here since it decreases my HELOC interest every time the fed drops the rates.
but there are def. other things i shrug on for sure 😉 def. out of our hands though…
Personally, with interest rates this low I prefer to buy big blue chip stocks with high “safe” dividends. You can find dividends out there over 3% with the potential of some capital appreciation.