Stocks
I took advantage of yesterday’s early morning “terrorism sell-off” to make a quarterly adjustment in my stock portfolio. I dumped the sluggish Coca-Cola Company [KO] in favor of the best of breed Intel. [INTC] I did this based almost entirely on my new favorite TV show, Mad Money with Jim Cramer.
I held Coke for about a quarter and while it did go up about $4 I didn’t get around to cashing out. Just like the casino I didn’t follow my head and press the “cash out” button. All told, we held the stock for 90 days and made $.60 per share plus a dividend of $3.31 a share. Not terrible. I was able to buy Intel during the early morning slump near it’s 2 week low of $26.20. I just set a limit at $26.25 and waited for the market to hit my number. So… I’m pretty excited about that. It’s already gone up to $26.87 as of 9:51 AM today. This morning a big analyst upgraded Intel’s earnings expectation for the 3rd quarter, so the stock is on the move up, up, and away. As I look at my streaming ticker from E*Trade I see that most of the buys for Intel are massive! Holy cow… Maybe one day I’ll own thousands of shares of companies… Maybe.
Taxes
My heart sank the other day as I went to the mail and saw the return address of “Internal Revenue Service.” I don’t cheat on my taxes, but pastor taxes are a tricky business and I’m always afraid I’ve screwed it up. I could see through the envelope “amount you owe” and “penalty” and I was almost sick. With the house hunting at full throttle… This would put us out of the housing market. To my relief I learned that while I did mess up my taxes, it was only by $1.00 with a $.01 penalty. Phew!
House hunting
This afternoon we are looking at about 5 more houses. There are two here in the village of Romeo… So we are excited about that. There are still 2 from last time that I am interested in, so we’ll see. Two of the houses today are within 100 yards of each other. But both are also on a major street in our area. We are still thinking that if all goes well, we could do this in a week. More on that later.
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