QuestForAMillion.net

Tax time! For most people this time of year is a time to be dreaded. But for some, those foolish among us, this is a time of “free” money. I was talking to a co-worker the other day. He’s expecting a tax refund of about $7000 this year. It’s usually in the $7000 - $8000 […]

The disappointing results for January have been posted on the Monthly Results page.
Due to the horrific stock market we had a net worth decline for the month. We managed to grow our cash a small amount and decrease our liabilities, but losses in college and retirement accounts wiped out any gains. We had a net […]

My company offers both Non-Qualified Stock Options (NQSOs) and an Employee Stock Purchase Plan (ESPP). I was granted a number of NQSOs when I started with the company and I’ve recently joined the ESPP. The ESPP allows employees to buy company stock at a 15% discount to the fair market value (FMV) of the stock […]

We received our first cash reward for using the Chase Freed Visa for our normal purchasing the other day. As advertised, we ordered a $250 check after racking up $200 in rewards. Getting money back for doing something we’re doing anyway sure is nice. Now if they can just figure out how to handle our […]

We’ve had a number of problems using our E*Trade Complete account as our primary checking account lately. Some I’ve documented on here, some I haven’t. After the issues we’ve had, we’ve decided that this account is not a good account to use as a primary day-to-day account. I like the structure of the account - […]

2007 wound up as a banner year for us financially. We surpassed our net worth goal of $100,000 by year end by over $8000. Given our starting net worth of $72,068, we increased our net worth by $36,631, a 50% increase. We changed philosophies about halfway through the year, opting to pay off debt rather […]

Our results for December are posted.
We had a nice increase in net worth last month, largely due to our current focus on saving. Taking command of our own escrow helped a bunch, since we can now count the money saved for insurance and taxes in our net worth. We had a net worth gain of […]

Personal finance is just that, personal. Not everybody does things the same way, nor should they. Every family and individual has a different situation, so what’s good for one isn’t necessarily good for another. We’ve all heard most of the mantras of personal finance so I won’t repeat them here, but I will list the […]

Since it’s near the end of the year we took a look at our overall income and spending this year and have made some budget category changes.  We were estimating too low an amount for average monthly income so we’ve tweaked that up a bit. Based on that and the financial moves we’ve made this […]

After reading about a change in house payment over at I’ve Paid For This Twice Already, I decided to look into removing our escrow from our mortgage payment. I contacted Countrywide and asked if we could handle our own escrow and what the procedure is. A couple of days later they informed me that our […]