Moved to my own domain - financialfruition.com

I am proud to announce that my new address is www.financialfruition.com. I look forward to posting regularly on personal finance issues, as well as shorter posts (please see the blue middle section of my new site).

I have changed my feed to reflect the new domain. However, if you have a link to me I would appreciate if you could update it. I will be sending an email to most of the folks so they can make the change, but I may forgot some. Thank you, in advance, for doing this at your earliest convenience.

Guess Who's Back

Whew, it's been a doooosy of a year so far for me. Death in the family, bad personal injuries, and Blogger deleting my blog for over 3 weeks. What fun. On top of all that, I had to complete my biggest project of the year, our Corporate annual report.

I must correct myself regarding my last post on Sarbox and working on my company's annual report. This year's 10-K filings were supposed to be due at the end of February, however the government granted an extension in mid January that allowed it to be filed as late as March 16, 2006. However, next year we go back to having to file by the end of February. I still feel it is somewhat ridiculous, but don't want to ponder at a better solution.

I look forward to getting back into the swing of things in the blogosphere. Time to build up readership again. Thanks to those who still have me in their RSS feeds and will read this.

Type at you soon.

Why I love Sarbanes Oxley

What a hoot! Let's regulate corporate financial reporting by upping the time required to file your company's Annual Report. Hey Mr. (or Ms.) Government, do you really think you are going to have so called, BETTER numbers by reporting them 2 weeks earlier?

To be honest (it was March 31st, then March 15th for last year, now the end of February for 2006), it really kind of ticks me off that our government imposes rules like these because it's completely backasswards. So that we can regulate companies better, we will just have them report numbers on a quicker basis, without consideration to what effect it may have on someone who is responsible for completetion of the Annual Report. Might it not cause undue stress, which could lead to errors?

Now don't get me wrong, I am mostly for the regulations contained within Sarbanes Oxley (thank you Enron!). They do serve the consumer and general public, I won't argue that. However, what about the people who put together a document such as the annual report? The bean counters and marketing people who actually DO the annual report. Our annual report used to be a normal project for me at the beginning of the year. This year, it is an enitre additional job! Now I have to still work on normal projects, while trying to work on the annual report at night. Ridiculous.

Needless to say, this is my reason for not posting that much, plus the fact that I had a death in the family in late January. Hopefully in the near future, I'll be in a more jovial mode.

Collector Cars -- Do you have $4 million to Invest?

Well one thing I know for sure that I would not invest in is 1 of 12 General Motors Futureliners ever made. I'm not sure, but I really hope a museum invested in this monstrosity. This custom made bus from the early 1950s, was up at this year's Barrett Jackson auction. Last year at this auction they had a concept car from the mid-1950s cross the block at $3 million. There are many better things I could think to do with this amount of money than spending it on some one-off vehicle that you can't really drive.

The craze of investing in collector cars has become more mainstream in the past few years. BusinessWeek has a section with articles on Collecting Cars. Speed Channel devoted 30+ live hours to this years Barrett Jackson Arizona auction (I watched about two hours of it!).

From what I've read and heard, muscle car collecting is all the rage now. Most of the cars I saw cross the auction block were 60's muscle cars: Corvettes, Camaros, Mustangs, Road Runners, etc. This, reportedly, stems from the baby boomer generation, who grew up wanting these cars around the age they were legal to drive. What was then a dream, can now become reality as they have amassed their savings and want to spend it on accumulating one, or a few, of these cars they idolized.

What do you think? Is it crazy to spend $50,000-$100,000 on you dream collector car?

Carnival of Personal Finance #32

This weeks carnival is up at Be Capitalism. Check it out when you have some time!

Making Progress

Last night I updated my progress report sidebar. Weight is coming down. Debt should come down further very soon (regular payments, as well as bonus/restricted stock). Net worth crept up a little (and it should go higher with my employee match in my 401(k)).

The Carnival of Personal Finance is up at Savvy Saver. Wow has this thing grown! So much to read, so little time to read it all!

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year to all!

There are some festivals and carnivals to check out this week, so without ado:

Carnival of Personal Finance #29
Carnival of Debt Reduction #16
Festival of Frugality #4

Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas to all! I'm back home with my parents enjoying some downtime. Hopefully the Holiday Season is treating you fine as well.