Hugh's Worthless Blog

I just received a new book in the mail from Joseph D'Agnese and Denise Kiernan. They are both journalists who have written for the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, and they have now written a personal finance book together specifically for the self-employed and part-timers, called The Money Book . They did interview me for parts of it, so I may be a bit biased, but after briefly skimming it, I think it is an easy to follow read that could benefit many people (not just personal finance geeks like myself). I will read the book more in depth, but upon first skim, I had to find some calculator worthy section I could use to develop some neat online tool. Therefore I have created my own Money Book calculator . This allows you to enter your monthly income and also specify how much to contribute to specific emergency, tax and retirement accounts and also all your "mandatory" monthly expenses. After entering your numbers it tells you how much you have left for discretio...

Since Microsoft decided to advertise Bing during the Olympics, I thought the least I could do was try it out a little bit. One thing I noticed is that the images they have on Bing Maps are actually newer than the ones that Google Maps has on either their normal maps or Streetview maps in the St. Louis area. One way to tell is by looking at highway 64 and the soundwall construction. My sample location is a house that is for sale in our area, namely 9062 Monmouth in Richmond Heights (63117). If you search for it on Google Maps you will see the highway is shut down and under construction but there is no wall yet constructed. If you then use Google Streetview and look at the house, as you move by its left side you will still see all the old trees and brush behind it which is how it looked even before the highway construction began. To see the pre-construction aerial view, you can use Bing and just look at the aerial projection. You will see a whole bunch of trees between the house and ...