Yodlee hooks up with Zillow!

I have talked about Yodlee before. Let me re-iterate that this totally free service is amazing. I use it to keep track of over 20 accounts! MONEY

Now you are probably thinking that 20 accounts is a few too many, and I can understand that. But when you start to count each account you have, checking, savings, visa, discover card, Roth IRA, 401(k)/403(b), and then double that if you are married, you get up there pretty quick. When I bought my hybrid, I opened several credit cards with 0% balance transfers to get 0% financing over an extended period of time. So on and so forth. With a tool as nice as yodlee.com, why bother closing accounts? MONEY

So I have my mortgage set up in yodlee, and pay my bill each month there. But I had to create a custom entry and enter the estimated value of my home as a manual account to get a realistic picture of my finances overall. Until this week that is. MONEY

I was browsing around one night and saw a link called "Real Estate Center." I clicked it and there was an option to set up my address in a tool that automatically goes to zillow.com and grabs the estimate. If you own a home or are shopping for a home and have not checked out Zillow, you should. It complies local sales information and tabulates home values and contains tons of tons of great information on top of a really neat interface that uses google maps and microsoft's visual earth. MONEY

And like yodlee, zillow is free. MONEY

So now Yodlee goes out and grabs my account values as well as my home's estimated value and pulls all the info together and provides charts and graphs of changes in value, spending, and now equity in my home = zillow estimate - mortgage! MONEY

WylieMoney Portfolio continues to slide

Close call, but the Vanguard funds beat my picks by .02% today. My funds are still ahead since my 'purchase,' but year to date they are tied. ETFs continue to fall behind. MONEY

Mostly Managed Portfolio Loses Ground...

...but still remains in the lead! MONEY

First of all, last week I went to Etrade's office in downtown Boston and explained my issue to Justin, who forwarded it to the 'Mutual Fund Department' with a link to this site. So if you are here looking for the details of my issue, click here or on the link in the upper right corner. Basically your site is not allowing me to set up an AIP plan with the additional minimum for AIP plans for the fund SSEMX which is $100. MONEY

On to the competition! MONEY

As of today, the WylieMoney portfolio is still ahead, but not by much. I think today's slight under performance is due to some dabbling of a few of my fund managers in emerging markets which did poorly before American markets caught fire. The year to date totals for WylieMoney and Lazy are remarkably close. I wonder how long that will last. MONEY

Anyway, I made a little chart of the the random dates that I have managed to document the total value of the accounts. This does not represent day to day performance as I only have totals from 8 days over the last month, but once I have several months of data, the graph should be loosely indicative of trends. MONEY

Etrade, don't do this to me!

Arrrrggghhhh. MONEY

On this site I have put together a pretty detailed hypothetical portfolio available for purchase through Etrade. I have not gone into great detail about if I would actually buy these funds if I could or if I own any of them. MONEY

I do own some of them but I do not own all of them. Some of the categories I researched here, are categories for which I already own a Mutual Fund that I bought years ago. Even though the fund I picked for this hypothetical portfolio might look a little better than the fund I own, it is not worth it to me to sell my fund and pay the capital gains tax and then invest the leftover money in a new fund, at this point in time. Also I do not own funds for each of these 20 specific categories. MONEY

One of the funds I do own is SSGA Emerging Markets SSEMX. I bought it back in May of 2006. I have also managed to save enough to add $100 to my initial investment at a couple of points since then (not every month though!). Since I bought it, my holdings in this fund have increased 27.46%! Not bad for one year. MONEY

This is a risky fund and that risk has been well rewarded over the short term. I imagine it is only a matter of time before Putin does something so un-democratic that western investors balk and sell Gazprom in droves or China's speculators finally try and jump ship or Chavez convinces the rest of South America to 'reclaim' their private businesses. I do not know what it will be, but something will send emerging markets into a downturn. MONEY

In fact, yesterday, SSEMX was my second biggest loser down -2.03%. My biggest loser, if you're curious, was PNRZX. If you click that link, you'll see that PNRZX has been on fire over the last 5 years. I personally have only gained 10.30% since buying in just over a year ago. Not too bad, but not great given the recent gains I missed out on. My only fund that increased in value yesterday was BTTRX, a WylieMoney pick, up 0.14% on the day. MONEY

Even though I do not think it necessarily the best time to buy an emerging market fund specifically, I did try and add another $100 to my holding several days ago and was denied.

The entire reason I bought this specific fund and recommended each of the WylieMoney funds over sometimes better funds in each category is the $100 minimum for additional investments. I am still trying to figure out what happened here, but the last time I added $100 to this fund was in February. Now the minimum that Etrade is letting me add to my holding is $1000. So something changed in the last few months. Despite trying to save and invest as much as I can, I cannot afford to add $1000. And I should not have to darn it! Here is what Morningstar claims the fund allows: MONEY


What I suspect happened was that SSEMX changed its 'Additional Minimum Investment' to $1000 recently. You can see above it is $1000 now- I do not remember if it was that way before February. Fine. Gone are the days I can add $100 whenever I have the $100 to add and think the timing is right. I am willing to set up the Automatic Investment Plan or AIP for this. The Additional AIP minimum is listed as $100. MONEY

Etrade allows you to set up an AIP that invests in a few different intervals: MONEY


If I can come up with $400 a year to add to this fund, I could choose the "Quarterly" option and be all set, right? Not so fast! Here is a picture of the option I get when trying to set up the additional AIP investments: MONEY


So I called Etrade and here is what they tell me. Despite the fact that I already paid at least an initial $1000 when I first invested, to set up an AIP now, I have to pay another $1000 before I can reduce the AIP investments to $100. Since you can start and stop an AIP at anytime, this leaves me wondering if I should not have just bought the fund through this screen and set it up with an AIP plan for once a year that I never intended to make on that schedule and then just adjusted the frequency and amounts as desired. MONEY

But this does not make sense. I should not have to pay different amounts based on which screen I used to buy the fund. Does this make sense to anyone else? Do all brokerages and funds that have different minimums for AIPs and and non-AIP subsequent purchases make you pay a separate 'Initial Investment Amount' to both buy the fund initially and then set up the AIP as well? MONEY

This is not what is going on at Etrade either, at least not consistently. Another WylieMoney recommended fund I own is American Beacon Large Cap Value Planahead AAGPX. Here are the details for this fund from Morningstar:



So to set up an AIP to automatically invest $50, I should have to first pay another $2500. But I don't. Here is my option in the drop down menu: MONEY


I'm going to try approaching Etrade again and see if I can find out more. MONEY

Habitat for Humanity Project to Build a Musician's Village in New Orleans!

Berklee College of Music is sponsoring a group of employees to go to New Orleans and work with Habitat for Humanity on a project to build a Musician's Village in the Upper 9th Ward!

How cool is that?

Harry Connick, Jr., Branford and Ellis Marsalis came up with the idea to build 70 homes and a Music Center.

Many of my colleagues applied for this sponsorship I was fortunate enough to be one of the ones chosen! Yesterday, I met the other 7 people who are going and I am excited! We head down in June and will be there for a week.