If you want to sign up for Etrade, I've got a deal for you!

I know of at least two WylieMoney readers who have signed up for Etrade. I just got an offer as a current Etrade user- If I refer a new user I get $50 plus the new user gets up to 100 commission free stock trades to use within the first 30 days of opening an account. The offer lasts through June 30 and does not count toward IRA or other retirement accounts. So if you are thinking about signing up, let me know and I'll shoot you the details of the deal I have.

I don't know any folks who are gonna benefit from being able to buy or sell 100 different stocks in a month, but hey, you never know. And if you did want an account and wanted to buy some GE and AAPL stock right off the bat, well this deal would save you about $20 and give me $50.

Don't pick Etrade just for this. Pick a brokerage that best addresses your needs. I was chatting with a couple who recently decided to open a brokerage account and one of their needs was a direct connection to a person they could establish a relationship with to work with at the brokerage to help them through the process of opening and managing their account. Etrade does not meet this need and was clearly not the right choice for them! I'm sure Etrade would disagree and probably offers this kind of support for a fee, but finding a financial planner or analyst you trust is an entirely different matter. This couple has such a planner already so Etrade did not make sense.

I have shared some of my thoughts about Etrade before. The tools Etrade offers are simple and fairly sophisticated. They have been expanding functionality since I joined which is great. Calling customer service, however, is rarely an encouraging experience. It has taken me many months to resolve past issues. I imagine their service reps are good at explaining how to use the site. But when the site is not working like they think it should be, they are not good at finding out why. I will soon be writing a post about a new problem I am having with Etrade. Their interpretation of individual Mutual Fund policies does not consistently match how their tool interacts with those policies. More about that soon.

So, after this hard sell (hehehe), if you want to open an Etrade account, please email me at wyliemoney at gmail dot com. But do not open an account if you do not plan to maintain a $10,000 balance after the first year as Etrade will sock you with inordinate quarterly fees.

Is Netflix a Good Deal?

Netflix, Blockbuster, cable, going out to Theatres... there are many ways to get your fix, if you love the cinema.

I signed up for Netflix in August of 2005 about 21 months ago and have rented 154 movies so I watch on average 7.3 movies per month. I have 275 movies in my queue so I will not run out of films I want to see, anytime soon. I am on the '3 movies at a time' plan which costs exactly $18.89 so the cost of watching 154 movies has been $396.69 or $2.58 per movie. I have not paid that much however.

If you have family or friends who give gifts for birthdays or holidays, and you use and enjoy Netflix, if those family or friends like to give you gifts you will actually enjoy and ask you for ideas, you can suggest a gift certificate for Netflix. I am blessed to have such family and friends and clearly enjoy Netflix and have said as much and have gotten a few certificates as gifts since I signed up. Combining these gifts (Thanks again!) with the first two weeks I got free from Netflix (you can occasionally find a month free for new users) I have spent $170.01 so I have actually paid $1.10 per movie.

There are no good video stores near my house. There is a blockbuster, but it has terrible selection and is often out of new releases. Plus, Blockbuster is evil.

For a while they had a corporate 'values' issue with movies that included content too adult for Americans. As a result of this 'issue,' they used their clout to force film distributors to censor certain films. Bad Lieutenant and Last Tango in Paris are a few I tried to rent which is how I learned about this 'policy' from Blockbuster. These were not 'made for TV' edits or cuts the studio did on their own with or without the directors and producers approval. These were 'censored for Blockbuster' versions.

I have no problem with a video store only carrying titles it wants to carry, for values or profits or any other reason. But to carry a movie that does not fit with your values, so you can profit from it, but force the distributor to come up with a censored version to somewhat assuage your guilt strikes me as hypocrisy. Is hypocrisy itself a 'value?' Does using Blockbuster mean this is a value you support?

Blockbuster copied Netflix' idea and now rents movies through the mail. Plus, you can go straight to your local Blockbuster and turn in your home delivered movies and get new films without having to wait for the next home delivery. This is a great idea. The one friend I have who switched from Netflix to Blockbuster took two movies to Blockbuster, but only had one return envelop with her. You can actually stuff a couple of movies into a single envelope and return them no problem through the mail, but Blockbuster would not take both movies without individual mailers, apparently unable to pull off what the US Postal Service has mastered so she actually had to pay for the second movie she wanted. Also, she went in looking for a specific new release which they did not have in stock.

I imagine your mileage will vary depending on your local Blockbuster branch, but let me present an alternative approach.

I use and am a fan of Netflix but sometimes I too want to watch a movie at home that is not one of the three I have from Netflix. Instead of running to Blockbuster, I hop down to my local Library. Although it does not carry as many titles, it has far better selection including a wide variety of independent and foreign films as well as many of the more popular TV series on DVD. It carries uncensored versions of the films it stocks which is nice and I pay $1 per rental and can keep each title for a week. So while $1 extra is not the same as 'included in the price of my rental program' I'm happy to pay my local Library $1 per movie.

Netflix is not perfect. Sometimes the discs are scratched or arrive broken and sometimes returning a broken disc means getting the same broken disc in the mail a few days later. They have some videos available for streaming over the internet, but this service is not available on a Mac which is what I have.

Regardless, for me, Netflix is worth it. Since I can get most TV programs I am interested in on DVD via Netflix I actually do not need cable. More about that soon.

Are hybrids a good deal?

Wired recently ran a story on revised EPA miles per gallon estimates. In particular, the estimates for Hybrids were significantly reduced:


As an owner of the Civic Hybrid since 2001, I am happy to report, that the revised estimate is pretty much spot on.


What interested me the most were the revised estimates for the regular Civic. I knew the old hybrid estimates did not reflect my experience and assumed the regular Civic estimates were off as well so I never felt I had good data to answer the question: "Are hybrids a good deal?"

First of all, no one buys 'hybrids.' One buys 'a hybrid.' And as the chart above shows, not all hybrids provide the same benefit over their non-hybrid siblings. Speaking of siblings, both of my brothers have Toyota Priuses. The Prius has no exact non-hybrid counterpart, but it gets better mileage than the Civic Hybrid and the standard Civic is not a bad comparison to the Prius for comparison's sake. We are fans of the hybrid, but do the numbers back our enthusiasm?

I have 83,200 miles on my Civic Hybrid. Comparing how many gallons of gas I have used and how much it has cost me to buy that gas compared to how much gas I would have bought with a regular civic, I find I have saved a couple of thousand dollars. I used a gas price of $2.70 since that is the figure used in the Wired article. I also run the numbers at $2.50 a gallon.

83,200 / 42mpg = 1981 gallons @ $2.70 per mile $5348.70 (@ $2.50 = $4952.50)
83,200 / 29mpg = 2869 gallons @ $2.70 per mile $7746.30 (@ $2.50 = $7172.50)

I have used 888 fewer gallons saving $2397.60 @ $2.70 or $2220 @ $2.50 per gallon. The hybrid cost several thousand dollars more than the standard model, but I got a significant tax credit so I have basically broken even. And with gas now over $3 per gallon, I stand to come out solidly, if only slightly, ahead.

Part of the recent adjustment in gas mileage estimates for hybrids has to do with the impact of not idling. When I come to a complete stop, at a stop light for example, my engine shuts off automatically. The EPA used to consider this with Miles Per Gallon estimates. While I agree that this does not impact the miles per gallon rate, as I am not traveling, the gas I do not burn, sitting in traffic or at a stop light, IS gas I do not use. So the savings noted above are underestimating my actual savings a bit.

So I use less gas, save a little money, pollute less... but some of you are asking- why not take public transportation? I live outside of Boston, unwilling to pay half a million dollars for a home closer to where I work, and unwilling to pay rent when I could get a mortgage on a house with payments close to my rent (back in 2001) just outside the city. So biking or taking a bus is out of the question.

We do have a commuter rail station near our house. The monthly pass for this is $210. My wife and I work in Boston so we commute together. Our cost to use the train would be $420 per month or $5040 per year.

$5040 per year. I actually took the train this morning -we use it when we need to. It lost power and had to stop completely and restart twice so I was a bit late getting in.

$5040 per year. We bought our hybrid in 2001 and have used it to commute for 6 years. With the cost of using the commuter rail over that period of time ($30240), I could have bought a new hybrid, paid for all the gas and tolls and had money left over to buy a mutual fund.

The interwebs are sticky full of "hybrids are lame" and "hybrids rock" articles and now I have added another. My 2 cents are- it depends on which hybrid and how you will use it and what other options you have for transportation as to whether it is worth it or not. In some situations, like mine, I came out slightly ahead. If the car holds up, I'll come out moderately ahead. And polluting less and consuming less gas has its own value on top of the $ savings!

Oh yea... and Managed funds win again!

I was kinda curious what would happen when the US Markets took a dive like they did today. I am pleased to report that the Wylie Portfolio won, losing hundreds of dollars, but not losing as much as the "Lazy Portfolio" of Vanguard funds or the ETFs.

Saving money on home improvement

I have several posts mulling around in my noggin but I have been too tired at night to get them out this week as we have been getting home from work and going straight to work, scraping the old peeling paint off the side of our house.


You can tell from the second picture how high I up I have to go to clean up the second floor windows and and digging into the old paint with a hand scraper that high up is kinda not cool.


But we have been scraping and painting one side of the house each year for three years. I have not priced out how much we are saving, painting ourselves, but I imagine it would buy a Wylie fund or two...


I just realized I do not have a good picture of either of the two sides we are done with. This one shows the front which we painted last year. The new color we are using is similar, but a bit more blue. You can also see the bags of leaves and pine needles we raked up, waiting to be taken to be composted by our town. Yes, we also do our own 'landscaping' which probably saves us enough for a few months of subsequent investments in a Wylie fund or two.