Adam Jewell – Search & Affiliate Marketing

You probably know Morningstar & Morningstar.com. They have a lot of research on stocks and mutual funds aimed at helping the average investor make smart investing decisions. They have good content and some good videos to help investors learn about various funds and stocks. They’ve got print publications and an online version.

Last year I subscribed to the online version. They must have kept track of how many times I went to the site and didn’t subscribe since the subscription price dropped as time went on. I found the video series moderately useful and would check to see what they had to say about various 401K and Vanguard funds. Little did I notice when I signed up they opted me into an auto renew deal where they just bill my credit card when the current subscription expires.

Someone over there probably decided they would make more money if they set everyone to auto renew and made it impossible to do anything about it on the Morningstar.com website. They sent out an email to alert me that they were going to auto renew the subscription at a rate higher than the original subsription rate. I went to the site to try to cancel and couldn’t do it so just sent them an email response telling them NOT to renew the subscription. I figured that should be sufficient and they would cancel the subscription.

A month or so later a charge from Morningstar.com shows up on my credit card for the new increased membership fee. I didn’t want to be auto renewed in the first place, I sent them an email to request they not auto renew and told them what I though of the auto renew policy and they still renewed my subscription.

Finally, I had to call them during their business hours and wait on hold for a few minutes before finally getting to talk to somoene who offered a $79.00 anual rate to try to get me to stay on as a subscriber. I think that was about HALF the rate they originally billed me for, for the renewal. The operator was pleasant but I’m still going to get billed something for however long it took to get the membership cancelled.

If you want some decent research on stocks and mutual funds, Morningstar.com is an excellent place to go to at least get your feet wet. If you subscribe, it seems like they assume you want to be a perpetual subscriber and will just keep billing your credit card until you call them and tell them to stop. When you do that, they’ll offer you a highly discounted rate.

Bottom line, if you don’t want to have to deal with yet another company that thinks they have the right to perpetually bill your credit card when you pay them once for something then don’t subscribe to Morningstar. If you like the content and want to play their little games, then call up and tell them you want to cancel and chances ae they will drop the price of your membership by nearly 50% to less than $100.

Down from a speculative buyout high of $36.70 on May 22 of this year, on Monday, July 30, 2007, ValueClick (VCLK) dropped to the sub $20.00 range after annoucing results that missed analysists estiamtes….by a whole penny. Earnings grew to 17.6 million 22% from year ago numbers while revenue came in at 148.7 million.

With a portfolio of online advertisnig companies, advertising networks, and the recent Mezimedia acquisition and still the potential to be acquired by one of the industry giants – Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, Ebay, Amazon or another company, ValueClick looks like a great buy at Tuesdays closing price of $21.38

If you are like most people saving for retirement may not be the first thing on your mind. Stocks, bonds, mutual funds, expense ratios, index funds, actively managed funds are all probably terms you’ve heard before.

Generally speaking you don’t have to be a Wall Street whiz to save for retirement and start to build up a nest egg. One of the best ways to have a reasonable chance at reasonable stock market returns is to create a lazy portfolio that merely seeks to keep up with the gains of the overall stock and bond markets. That’s what an index fund is. It doesn’t try to outsmart or beat the overall stock market; it just aims to stay with it. Most actively managed funds (where the portfolio manager trades stocks and bonds more frequently cost you more money in trading fees and commissions and result in sub-par returns for you over the long haul.

On the subject of expenses or expense ratios (the percentage of the money you have invested in a mutual fund that the mutual fund company charges to manage the fund), Vanguard is the most well known mutual fund company for helping investors keep more of their money by keeping fund expenses low.

When you signed up for your company 401K, did you happen to pay much attention to the fees associated with your account? Some 401K providers offer retirement plans for businesses in which the company providing the plan harvests a FORTUNE in fees which greatly diminishes your overall returns.

When you buy funds through a company like Vanguard, the expense ratios are typically much less than 1%, sometimes as low as 0.1%. If you have a 401K plan through some other 401K custodians, you will have a selection of funds to choose from, each with what are often higher than average expense ratios. Often times, since the 401K custodians send business to those mutual funds by administering 401K plans, the custodian is likely to get a referral fee from the fund company. Sometimes buying through a 401K custodian can benefit you buy eliminating the loads some fund charge. A load is a fee you pay to buy (front end load) or to sell a fund (back end load).

In addition to a 401K custodian getting a (reasonable) kickback from the fund company, they also tack on another fee in many cases. This fee can be at least as high as 1.45%, which mean that each and every year, they take up to 1.45% of your total assets to administer your 401K plans.

So what does that mean to you in plain English?

Lets say you’ve been a 401K participant for a while, your investment choices have done reasonable well and your balance is $100,000. At the end of the year or maybe with each contribution you make when you get paid, your employer gives you some kind of matching contribution. Lets say the match ends up being $1,500 for the year. Well, if you have a balance of $100,000 and your 401K provider charges an additional 1.45% annually of your assets to administer your 401K, they will take $1,450 for administering your account each year. It was nice of your employer to give you a match; to bad the fund company took it all to pad their pockets. If the funds available in your 401K plan are not Vanguard funds with really low expense ratios, you may pay another 1% or more so that annually on a $100,000 balance you pay $2,500 to have your 401K.

Unfortunately unless you can get your company to switch 401K providers, there isn’t much you can do about this if you want to max out your tax deferred retirement accounts. If you are not maxxing out the total amount you can save between a 401K and an IRA and your 401K plan has outrageous expenses like this, you should consider putting in just enough to get the employer match and the starting a traditional IRA or a ROTH IRA. Companies like Vanguard are great for no transaction fee, very low expense ratio funds. E*Trade Brokerage is great for ETFs or individual stocks. Vanguard has a great variety of stock and bond index funds to track various benchmarks and indices and target retirement date funds that adjust your asst allocation for you as you get older.

Turbo Tax makes pretty good tax software. There have several different versions that may fit your needs. Unfortunately their IT department isn’t so good. I, like many other tax filers started working on the 2006 income tax return a few months before it was due but didn’t get around to actually filing the return until April 17th, the day taxes were due for the 2006 tax year. Being a tax company, Turbo tax should have anticipated a flood of tax filing on tax day. Intuit is a tax company, ya know?

Around 9 or 10pm on April 17th, I tried to fiile my taxes with theri e-file system. Not so fast, it came back with some kind of computer error. Hmmmm, well maybe the servers were flooded, it could happen to anybody but surely they will get this fixed before midnight. To make a long story short, by 4am they still did not have their act together. It did appear that the tax return had gone though once or twice but when I logged back in to make sure it did go through it said it didn’t.

The next day, Public Relations genius Harry Pforzheimer was quoted as saying “Don’t wait until the last minute is the moral of the story,” he said. Hey, why not just go back to paper and pencil if your tax software company can’t handle a tax day filing rush?

By 4am, Intuit was showing charges on my credit card & by the time the return acrually went through, there were 3 charges for filing one tax return. After feeling like I got hit by a truck the whole next day at work due to the lack of sleep, I called the Intuit customer service department to see what we could do about getting the errant charges refunded.

I had never called India before (but I’d heard horror stories from people who thought they were calling Dell tech support and somehow got routed to India) but somehow managed to talk to a very cordial young woman who could barely speak English. She acknowledged I was charged 3 times but couldn’t do anything about it. I guess it takes 3 days for the charges to be editable in the Intuit computer system. She was able to give me some combination of letters and numbers that I would have to call back later and read off to someone. Oh, and that audit defense product they offer that I always buy? There is another computer system that handles that and another phone number you have to call to take care of that.

I bought one of their Quicken software packages before, discovered it was the wrong one and got no help from the custmer service department at all on that one when trying to upgrade.

A few days aftr this mess, Intuit sent out an email stating that ALL changes for Turbo tax would be refunded. So far 2 out of 3 charges were refunded. It looks like they’ll cling to the last one.

As far as I can tell, the tax return made it in on time. As far as they are concerned, Intuit delivered on what they said they would. Regardless of their guarantees or lack thereof for functionality of the software, there is no way tax filers should have to pay after going thorugh all that. Had Turbo Tax refunded the fees charged, I’d still be a Turbo tax customer.

It is inexcusable for a tax company not to be prepared for a surge of tax returns on tax day, for them to make comments about waiting till the last minute to file taxes, having support representatives that can barely speak English who cannot access or fix orders and causing such a big mess for everyone.

Got any suggestions for relaible tax prep companies next year?

Being self employed has lots of unique financial challenges. Health insurance, having to foot the bill for everything you need and handle everything that comes up. When it comes to saving for retirement, however, you as a self employed individual have some awesome opportunities!

When you work for a company, you may or may not be able to participate in a 401K offered by the company. You can usually save up to about 15% of your pre-tax salary in a 401K but the percentage will vary by company and 401K plan. (Ever wonder why your 401K balance doesn’t seem to go anywhere?) For the 2007 tax year, the most you can put in your 401K is $15,500. If your company is nice, they’ll give you some kind of match that my have to vest over a period of time before it is actually yours to keep.

If you have any self employment income whether you have a regular job or not, you can also contribute to a SEP IRA. That’s right you can participate in an employer sponsored retirement plan as well as a SEP! Unlike traditional IRAs and ROTH IRAs for which the contribution limit is $4,000 for 2007 and $5,000 for 2008 for those under 49 ($5,000 and $6,000 respectively for those 50 and up) you can put up to $45,000 or 25% of your income into your SEP for the 2007 tax year.

Between a SEP and an employer sponsored 401K you could sock away about $60,000 in your retirement accounts and get a HUGE tax deduction for 2007. If you make enough to max out a SEP, well, ya don’t really hae any need for a job. So whether you are an affiliate or self employed in any other capacity, be sure to take advantage of the huge contrbutions you can make to a SEP IRA in 2007!

Though it requires more paperwork, you can also do a solo 401K. Between the employer and employee contributions you can often have much lower income that is needed for a SEP to put around $40,000 away each year tax free.