President Bush today signed into law an updated GI Bill that had broad bipartisan support. The new bill provides service members, who served in the military for at least three years, full tuition at any in-state public university along with a monthly housing stipend. The benefits (which are as high as $90,000) can also be used at private schools.

The bill adjusts the benefit scale based on cumulative active service, a move that levels the playing field between active duty, National Guard, and Reserve members. Everyone on active duty will receive the benefit from now on free of charge.  Previously, service members paid $1200 to buy into the benefit. Benefits are also significantly higher, up to $90,000 from $40,000 under the old plan. The bill also allows veterans to transfer education benefits to their spouses or children.

With the rising cost of secondary education,  service to our country is a great way to pay for college and an excellent way for our govenment to reward our brave veterans.

Budweiser has been running an ad showing an old refrigerator being moved to the garage when the new one is purchased. It says that although it doesn’t have a water dispenser or an ice-maker, it has plenty of room for what’s really important, i.e. Cold Beer. While the ad is entertaining and does make a good point about reuse and storage capacity, it fails to consider one of the main reasons we replace appliances today: improved energy efficiency. We will only see our electric bills go down if we replace appliances with more energy efficient ones. Adding a new appliance, even one that is energy star compliant, while still running the old one will cause our electric bill to go up.

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Many real estate sites can give you a profile of a town, or even a neighborhood, but none tell you about your actual future neighbors. To fill that need comes the site Rotten Neighbor. There you can see negative (and positive) comments made about people in your neighborhood. More than just barking dogs and lack of yard maintenance, you can get the inside scoop on other items that may devalue property that you are considering. Nation sex registry data is also included to show if dangerous predators live nearby. Foreclosure data is also available. Knowing the good and the bad about a potential neighbor may influence your interest in a property and may even cause you to reconsider the price you’ll offer. Not knowing this information could end up costing you both while your living in the home and when you try to sell.

This post is part of my Freaky Financial Fridays series, where I argue a case from an opposing view, generally in contradiction to my own philosophy or conventional financial advice.

Why is it that we are afraid to maximize our single greatest investment, the home in which we live? There may be better investments out there, but the fact is that most of us don’t take advantage of those alternatives. Even those who realize the incredible growth potential of real estate usually stop after buying their own home. Unless you are planning to take on an investment property with positive cash flow or take full advantage of other, better investments, then buying the most expensive home you can afford may help your finances to grow the most.

If your house goes up in value by 30% between when you buy it and when you sell it,

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The latest book review here at Richer by the Day is How Come That Idiot’s Rich and I’m Not? by Robert Shemin.

The author has always had trouble getting things right. He constantly made mistakes. As a result, he also got it wrong when trying to make the mistakes that hold people back from wealth. By understanding this double negative, backwards logic (he can’t even screw up right) he was able to rewrite the rules for success, which are oftentimes the complete opposite of the things we do when aiming for success.

Following his own advice to keep things simple, the simplicity of the philosophy is what makes it so powerful and achievable. Simplicity inspires focus

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Citing higher gasoline prices, the IRS has increased the optional business standard mileage rate from 50.5 cents per mile to 58.5 cents per mile for July-December of 2008. Taxpayers can use the optional standard rates to calculate the deductible costs of operating an automobile for business. This is also the rate at which your company will typically reimburse you for business mileage using your personal automobile.

This update is great news for business owners who use the rate to calculate deductions and employees who get reimbursed. Normally, the IRS Mileage Rate is set once for the entire year, so it’s nice to see that this special adjustment was made, considering how high gas prices have risen this year. The standard mileage rate covers not just gas, but also all other costs of operating the vehicle. Business typically have two options for deducting transportation expenses. They could either buy a company car and pay for all of the insurance, gas, maintenance, etc, or use personal vehicles and reimburse at the standard mileage rate. The standard rate is used to simplify reimbursements, but actual costs of operating a personal car for business use may also be used in some cases.

As part of the update, the new six-month rate for computing deductible medical or moving expenses will also increase by eight cents to 27 cents a mile.

Finding cheap gas in your area is becoming increasingly important to everyone’s budget. In the past I’ve spoken highly of Gas Buddy which does just that. To make the search even easier, there is now a website that merges Gas Buddy data with a Google Map of your area. The combination of the two is so natural and should prove to be highly successful. The site, affectionately known as Google Gas, has gained so much interest that it has been overwhelmed with traffic and largely unavailable. Hopefully Google will provide some reliable server space to this excellent use of their technology. Until Google Gas is back online, you can use the old Gas Buddy site to find the best deal.

Lending Club, which has been in a quiet period due to a pending SEC filing, issued the following press release today:

Lending Club Files Registration Statement with the SEC

SUNNYVALE, CA - June 20, 2008 - Lending Club announced today that it has filed a registration statement with the Securities and Exchange Commission under the Securities Act of 1933 relating to its social lending platform.

The registration statement seeks to register the offer and sale of up to $600,000,000 in Member Payment Dependent Notes to be issued by Lending Club in a continuous offering following the effective date of the registration statement. The Notes will be issued in series with each series of Notes corresponding to a single consumer loan to a borrower member. Lender members will direct Lending Club to apply the proceeds Lending Club receives from the sale of each series of Notes to fund a particular consumer loan selected by the lender member and originated through the Lending Club platform.

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More on this topic (What's this?)

Summer Rerun: “Unwinding the Fraud for Bubbles” (naked capitalism, 7/23/10)

Small Businesses Face Record Spreads, SBA Lending Cliff Dives in June, Boding Ill for Employment (naked capitalism, 7/11/10)

Read more on Loans at Wikinvest

photo credit: muztiko

Going “All In” is best known in the poker world, but also shows up in investing in the form of the All or None qualifier.

All or None is an option when buying or selling a security much like choosing the type or duration of the order. What All or None means is that the order will not be filled unless it can be filled in its entirety. Let’s say you place a limit order to buy 100 shares of stock at $50 each:

• Without using the All or None qualifier, your order would be filled as the stock became available at that price. So if there were any shares available at $50, you would buy them. As more were offered at that price, you would continue to buy them until you had the 100 shares you requested. You could end up making your purchase over the course of many transactions. In a highly liquid market, these multiple transactions might appear to occur at almost the same time.

• If you selected the All or None qualifier for the transaction above, your order would not be filled until a full 100 shares were available at your price. You would then get your shares in a single transaction. So, like the name implies, you either get all of your shares, or none of them.

The main scenario where I use All or None is when

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There are some computer based tasks that computers cannot do as well as humans. Instead of hiring people full time to perform such services, many companies turn to Amazon’s Mechanical Turk website. There you can sign-up and get paid to perform simple tasks.

To get an idea of how profitable the site could be, I created an account and began working on a few Human Intelligence Tasks (HITs). After practicing with a few, I thought I’d time myself. I was able to complete 69 HITs in 10 minutes. The HITs I was working on paid $0.02 each, so I earned $1.38 in 10 minutes, or $8.28 an hour.

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