The first thing that I learned is that I need to set my personal financial goals, for next year, and next 3-5 years, and maybe next 20-30 years.

SMART: Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Realistic, Time-Bound.

Goals for next year:

1. Save up for EMERGENCY STASH, and set aside 3-6 months expenses by end of year 2008;
2. Save up for VACATION expense annually, if I put traveling budget $3000 and snowboarding budget $800, I should save approximately $4000 for this item;
- Wow, what does this mean is that I need to save 23K within next year. It almost looks like there’s no way that I can save $1917 per month but here are my action plans:

Action plans:

1.  Refinance my mortgage: A.Get rid of the mortgage insurance; B. Change into interest-only. This should save me $750 per month. However, I need to look into how much closing fee I need to pay and if that still makes sense;
2.  Stock awards: I’m putting around $700 into stock award and given 10% in return that is $770. However, I might be able to put more into it so that I have more return;
3.  Save on car insurance: A. Get rid of the unnecessary policy on my car insurance; B. Check my car insurance change;
4.  Reduce my current monthly expenditures: www.lowermybills.com
5.  Reduce my shopping cost (see next post);
6.  Investment Strategy: I need a better investment strategy, and define my risk/return expectation and tolerance.

So as I decided, I’d like to back out from my stock investment for a while and take a break. One obvious reason is that I have the entire December for vacation outside the country. Other reason is that I want to re-think my strategy and do a lot of reading, sort out my finance and, also career.

I just started reading “Investing Success: How to Conquer 30 Costly Mistakes & Multiply your wealth”. I’ve been founding it having great points. Since I need to return it to the library, I decide to take reading notes to my personal situation.

Bought 55 shares of FRM @$9.04;

Bought 50 shares of QXM @9.93 and 50 shares of QXM @9.88, so the average price is $9.91. This is one of the sweetest thing of using Zecco! For example, today I really want to buy QXM again, but the price is looking a bit high, so I first bought 50 shares when it went a bit down (in case it went up too much later), and then it kept going down more, I bought some more. Really need to take advantage of $0 comission fee!

New Lesson Learned today:

1. Look at after hour price/trades: very important parameter for the open price the next day. Also, Google Finance and Zecco provide this – but not every site (btw, MSN Money is so lame! It provides this really nice-looking interactive chart tool, however, when you click on a point, it usually doesn’t show the price. Instead, Google Finance doesn’t require you to install anything and it just works. *sigh*);

2. Look at real-time quotes: Zecco can always returns real-time quote (last sale price), it’s really helpful if you use Limit Order a lot. Fidelity also provides this function, but you either need to open a new window or go ahead and make an order.

Anyways, I’m feeling lazy today, so keep it short. Now that market has gone to a normal state, I need to learn something that works for a good market. A lot to learn from ClearStation (I’m loving it!)… and I just got really into this fiction “The Key” and I want to do some reading tonight!