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401k and Personal Finance Stocks

Joined Bank of America Keep the Change Program

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(Update 05-07-2010) I just found out some more details on how it works. Per BoA’s FAQ of the Keep the Change Program, “The matching funds will be credited annually to your savings account. This will take place within 8 weeks after the month of your enrollment anniversary for the Keep the Change® savings service.”

(Update 04-04-2010) I found US Bank “Start” saving program also to be interesting. I may join them after I “kept” enough changes from BoA in the initial 90 days.

(Original) I heard about it for a long time, today I took the plumage: I went to the local BoA branch and opened a Savings account, and because I already have checking account and check card with them, I enrolled into the Keep the Change program. Quote BoA:

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We’ll match your Keep the Change savings for the first 3 months, to the penny. After that, we’ll continue matching 5% a year. The maximum total match is $250 per year.
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So it looks like the offer is less generous than the old one, where they match penny by penny until hit annual limit ($300?). In other words, there is no 3 month sweeten deal, then 5% match thing. It’s more like I missed the hot deal 🙁

But look at another way, I need the Savings account regardless, the Keep the Change is just ice on cake.

Categories
Software development

Some corrections to Hibernate tutorial

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Hibernate logo
I was referring to the First application at Hibernate (Jboss) offical documentation. I found some problems when doing the exercise: just want to share some of my findings so others may benefit.

1) dependency version missing: there are already some some discussions on the Hibernate discussion forum, such as this one and that one. I followed the first one: added the version numbers as suggested and the problem went away.

2) jdbc driver can not be found, the fix is to

mvn install:install-file -DgroupId=hsqldb -DartifactId=hsqldb -Dversion=1.8.1.2 -Dpackaging=jar -Dfile=/path/to/your/hsqldb.jar

in my case (mac) this is /Users/major_xu/Downloads/hsqldb/lib/hsqldb.jar

I saw discussion on this one, too, the suggestion is to “add classpath for hsqldb.jar”. But I don’t know how to do it in maven command line.

3) misc: there are a lot other corrections:

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Uncategorized

Baby grows fast

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Serenity is more than 3 weeks old. I still remember the exhausting, exciting and unsure feeling when we got back from hospital: we got to take care of her alone. Without professional help from the nice people St. John’s Mercy’s childbirth center.

The initial few days are a bit chaotic, both for myself and my wife. Then things settle down a bit, as baby eats well, and sleeps well: except she mixed up day with night. In other words, she sleeps well in afternoon and evening, but she wakes up very often (every hour or so) and needs her mom’s feed and attention.

In last few days, we tried to train her sleep better in the night (this is also advice from our Pediatrician). So far so good. Now the longest stretch is about 4 hours in the night. She continues to gain weight, and have more activities on her hand. Besides holding the feeding bottle, she tries to hold me or my wife when we hold her sometime. More interaction between us.

Categories
finance

Financial considerations: health insurance

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Ever since the birth of our baby Serenity (Youyang),she has seen doctors, pediatricians to be precise.This is common in the US, as each baby (supposely) has a pediatrician look after her/him. Of course, this is assume the baby has health insurance coverage. In the US it usually means she/he will be covered under one of the parent ‘s plan, or in the case of no plan for parents, there are some government plans for low income family kids.

I was a bit nervous on the health insurance thing, both for my wife’s labor and the baby, because I changed my employer recently, which also means I am enrolling in a new plan (unknow factors). The new plan is slightly expensive than my old plan, understandably because my new employer is a smaller organization (compared to the old one), resulting in less negotiation power. Health insurance (excuse me healthcare) reform has being a hot topic in the US because of year long debate, and the dramatic ending (house passed the bill on Sunday). Hopefully when my baby has her kid, she need not worry too much about that?

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Categories
Fun

Youyang starts to feed herself

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This evening, when I got back home, my wife was bottle feeding the baby, and the baby started to hold the bottle using both her hands. After a while, my wife let her hand loose, and Serenity (Youyang) continued to hold the bottle, and feeding herself. I will post a picture tomorrow. Her feeding self act made all of us laugh for a while.

IMG_7249

(hosted on Flickr)

Categories
401k and Personal Finance

Tax tips 2010: double check ESPP income

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ESPP stands for Employee Stock Purchase Plan. My former employer is a public company, and it offers a good ESPP plan: 15% discount of stock market price at the beginning or the end of plan period (pick the lower of the two prices, then apply 15% discount), the plan period is usually 6 months. I took advantage of that. I was nervous about the market crash in Jan 2010, so I locked in my gains in late 2009. But I found a catch until today when I finalize the federal income tax using Turbo Tax (got 35% off referral from Bank of America here).

Basically I found my W2 form already included the ESPP gain (as my ordinary income). And I already put those in the investment section before today. That’s double counting my income! I am glad I caught this when I double checked my W2 form 😀

Opened traditional IRA
To correct the mistake I made about selling ESPP stocks too earlier, also combined with my new employment situation, I opened an IRA account to reduce the taxable income for year 2009.

Categories
gadgets Stocks

Is PALM here to stay: II

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I sold my few shares of Palm Friday morning shortly after opening. Palm (Nasdaq:PALM) share dropped 29% on Friday after horrific earning outlook (marketWatch). Palm is increasingly likely to say “bye bye” to its loyal customers in a year or two. Quote sobelmedia:

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I’m never going to forget my very first Palm Pilot in 1998…how cool…it was everything I needed and wanted in a handheld device…addresses, notes, contacts everything…and it had the ability to sync with my computer to keep it up to date. Over the years the company changed owners, management, operating systems and the competition heated up all at the same time. Now it appears as though Palm is at the end of the rope and Wall Street is ready to say goodbye.
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I think PALM has to blame itself for the recent problem (since webOS based Palm Pre launch at Sprint network last July). I saw the following problems:

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Categories
advice and tips

Burp, gas

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Baby grows very fast, these days she eats a lot, and sometimes just cannot wait to eat when her mom starts to feed her. She probably swallow quite a bit gas in the process. But due to her size (2 weeks old tomorrow), she cannot get rid of the gas easily. Thus we can hear her colic from time to time (refer to Baby Colic from Wiki).

I was pretty nervous initially. As I learn more facts, think about it, and learn how to burping, I became more confident.

Other than that, she is doing well. Tomorrow, we will take her to see doctor (2 weeks scheduled visit).

Categories
advice and tips

Burp, burp, burp

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It seems our baby needs quite some burp. Here are 2 “how to burp baby” videos from Youtube. Burping is something daddy can help out mommy. It’s also a great way for daddy to communicate with baby.

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Uncategorized

Daddy’s responsibility

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We took the “new parents” class at St. John’s before delivery. That’s quite informative, the topics ranges from preparation for labor, to feed the baby, to home safety, there is even a short presentation by a pediatrician: on the basics of baby healthcare matters. I also remember the instructor asked us (the future dads) two tasks: put the cribs together; install the infant car seats.

Life would be too easier if that’s the only tasks for dads. From emotional support when the pregnant wife have cramps and/or difficulty to sleep due to growing belly size, house chores, to big picture issues like child development and education. I am not saying this to make myself and other new dads to worry, I think the important thing is we have a game plan. It’s hard to predict which college our kid will go, which major will she pick, but we can think about the college funds, put away some while building our nest eggs, etc.

Grandpa fix

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