Jc3900's Personal Finance Blog

Wow, I havn't made a blog entry in a LONG time. Well since my last entry, a lot has happened. Firstly, my effort to send the the two colleges eachother's offers worked great. I took a full tuition offer from a state U to school 1. School 1 responded back and added $5000 a year to their offer. I then took School 1's offer to school 2. School 2 then offered me $2000 more a year and a $1500 yearly loan with absolutly no interest. I decided to go with school 3 as it is only 2 hours away from home, has the academic programs I want, a Division III tennis team, and a trimester schedule giving me great flexibility to take a semester off and go skiing!

In other news on the financial front, last week I won a scholarship. In typical fashion of my family I missed the award ceremony(I was taking the AP Macro and Micro Exams), my parents missed it also, and I didn't find out about it until 6 hours after it was announced. Anyway, the scholarship was a one time award for a thousand dollars! This will reduce my tuition + Room and Board to only $14,000 for next year!

Besides receiving the scholarship my dad has been investing bank dividends from a stock inheritance for me. I am getting dangerously close to the mark $6000 in my S&P 500 and when I do, I am selling half of the account and investing $3000 in vanguard's emeging market index.

Another very cool thing that I have just started today is a summer internship with my grandpa's engineering firm. I will be working a lot with excell and access and it will be really good grounding when I send my resume to insurance companies and consulting firms and interview for an actuarial internship for next summer. The bad thing about the internship is that I am getting like 35% of the salary I will get next year with a bigger company and I don't get paid until the end of the summer. However, it is still great experience and is all I can get, so I am grateful for it still.

Oh and if I didn't mention this allready, I am graduating from high school this friday. YEAAAAAAAAHHHHHHH!!!!

Ok, so as I am a senior, college is right around the corner. I am basically considering 3 schools right now. The first college I am considering is about two hours away from home, making it far enough to give me space from my family but still close enough to come back and see them. College 2 and 3 are both located about 1500 miles away in Salt Lake City utah. Although the distance is a considerable distance from home, both colleges have 30 minute access to the best skiing on the planet, which is a major plus for me. The negative of colleges 2 and 3 is that I would also be 1500 miles away from my current gf of nearly 4 years who is attending a college very close to college 1. Now here is where it gets even more confusing. College 1, which is currently my favored choice, has offered me a scholarship package that would make the cost of attending about $15,000 per year (that includes room and board). I won't hear back from college 2 until first week of april about scholarships and their current package would make it about $18,000 a year to attend. College 3 is the least favorite of the three and is much bigger, however, they have just offered me a full tuition scholarship. Because of the scholarship, it will only cost $6,500 to cover room and board. My current plan is to wait on college 2's scholarships and then go to college 1 and ask if they will match or make an offer to counter the best scholarship I will have by then, whether it is from college 2 or 3. Oh and here is the other kicker to make it even a littl more confusing. Because I allready have so much college credit racked up I will likely be able to graduate in 2.5-3 years max, which will reduce college cost. Also, I have about $80,000 in inheritance. I know that reducing costs is very important, but at the same time it isn't exactly THE MOST IMPORTANT as all of the colleges tuition is relatively affordable for me. What do you guys think. My brain is about to explode!

This past saturday, me and my gf decided to take a trip up to chicago, so I am going to give an overview of my activities. We drove up about 3 miles outside the city, parked, and took the train into michigan avenue and the magnificent mile. Before we did anything, we went to the john hancock tower and went to Cheese Cake Factory. The food was awesome and the Godiva Cheesecake was incredible. It was a costy meal at $30.00 but as we were in Chicago for a "special" date, I stomached the cost. After we ate at Cheese Cake Factory, we went to watterson towers and walked through the entire 7 floors. We must have hit about 20 stores. It was really cool as about half of the stores that we went to arn't in my hometown. Being somewhat cheap, we didn't buy anything and just enjoyed the afternoon walking through the mall. We then went into Macy's and I reluctantly took 30 minutes for her to try on dresses. After Macy's, we decided to walk through Saks Fifth Avenue. We knew that the clothing would be rediculously priced and that it would just be for laughs. However, we had no idea that the prices would be so outrageous. Almost everything in the freaking store was over $300. It also felt really wierd going into the store with just tennis shoes. There were also tons of items that shot up into thousands. One memorable designer named valentino had multiple jackets that were selling for over $5,000. The real kicker is when we went into the fur section. After seeing multiple $10,000+ coats, I found the big one. A sabel fur coate retailing for:$ 52,000.00. Me and my gf almost had a cow we couldn't stop laughing. I don't really know who buys clothing from that store, but I do know that I would consider it a sin in my book. After Saks, we went into neiman marcus which was very similar and then headed to the train to go home. The day was really fun, but the Saks Fifth avenue took the cake.

Well, this is my first blog entry and I thought I would go political. In this entry I will give an overview of Clinton and Obama's economic policy. For a more in depth view at their economic polcies go to

http://www.motherjones.com/news/update/2008/02/obama-vs-clinton-economic-policy.html

1. Subprime Crisis

Both Obama and Clinton would like to see 30 billion dollars put to stopping foreclosures.

2. Tax Stimulus Plan

Clinton wants a 24 billion dollar stimulus and Obama is in favor of a 75 billion dollar stimulus. Oh and this only goes to those qualified, aka you upper middle class savers don't get a dime.

3. Social Security/Retirement

Clinton is suggesting to set up government sponsered 401k where the government matches the first 1000 dollars that you save. Obama's plan is similar although it only matches you 50% on your first 1000 dollars. Oh and in obama's plan, you can only qualify if you make less than 75,000 dollars.

4.Energy Independance

Clinton would like a 50 billion dollar energy fund started and 5 million new energy jobs employed by what one would assume as the government. Obama is similar except that he wants to invest 150 billion dollars over the next 10 years and set up 2 million energy jobs.

5.Healthcare

Both have come out with plans to insure everyone whether mandatory or not. However, experts say that nearly any form of universal healthcare will cost at least 50 billion dollars. Looking at the growth in medical cost, I would wager it is many multiples of that number.

6. Taxes

Obama wants to increase effective taxes on the highest marginal bracket to 52%. He also wants to increase the highest bracket on dividend income from 15% to 40%. Also, he wants to increase capital gainst to 28 %. Hillary, I am guessing is probably just as bad, but right now I am to depressed to write about her.

There it is, my first very vague blog that doesn't even hit on all of the facts that would really hit the point.