Tuesday, January 29, 2013

Barclays 5-year CD

One of the best CDs currently available for taxable accounts (IRA accounts are not available) is the Barclays 5-year CD, with an APY of 1.85% and an early withdrawal penalty (EWP) of 90 days of interest. See Ken Tumin's blog post CD Rate Hike at Barclays at DepositAccounts.com for details.

Thursday, January 24, 2013

Stocks Are Up; I'm Rebalancing

You may have heard that stocks have been hitting five-year highs lately. When you hear this in US news sources, they usually are referring to the S&P 500 or the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Of these two, the S&P 500 is more representative of the broad US stock market, but it leaves out most smaller cap stocks.  Broader indexes that represent the total US stock market are up even more over the last five years. Given this strong performance, I have come close enough to my rebalancing band for stocks vs. fixed income that I have sold some of my US stock funds.

Friday, January 18, 2013

I'm Buying More I Bonds

Sometime toward the end of this month I will buy more I bonds for my personal and trust accounts at TreasuryDirect. The current annual rate is 1.76%, so I will earn half of that, or 0.88% for the first six months (January through June). The rate for each subsequent six month period depends on inflation as measured by the CPI-U. If inflation is 0% or less for the six months ending March 31, 2013, the rate for the second six months would be 0%, so I would earn a total of 0.88% over one year (actually a little more, since I'm buying toward the end of January, but will earn interest for the full month of January). Even this worst case scenario isn't bad, since I'm earning a little less than 1% in my online savings account. More importantly, I increase my allocation to super-safe, inflation-protected investments.