Authors

Karen Chan

Karen Chan
Extension Educator, Consumer Economics

Paul McNamara

Paul McNamara
Extension Specialist, Consumer Economics

Kathy Sweedler

Kathy Sweedler
Extension Educator, Consumer Economics

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Plan Well, Retire Well

Saving and investing your money

May 28, 2009

Smart Home: Green + Wired

For great ideas on how to save money and be green, visit Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry's new exhibit, Smart Home: Green + Wired.

The house – and the exhibit is actually a full-scale house – is a modular home powered by solar energy and a wind turbine. Everywhere you turn in the house is another motivating idea or innovative product. I was completely jazzed after my visit. If you live near Chicago -- go see this exhibit. If you don't, visit their website for a virtual tour.

One thing about visiting this type of exhibit, while we can't easily do all the things the home shows us about energy conservation, there are many ideas that we can incorporate into our own homes to save energy and money.

Here are some ideas that you can do today:

  • Reverse the rotation of your ceiling fan blades. In the summer, use the ceiling fan in the clockwise direction. While standing directly under the ceiling fan you should feel a cool breeze. The airflow produced creates a wind-chill effect, making you "feel" cooler.
  • Unplug chargers for cell phones, portable music players, or other portable devices; these devices draw energy even when they're not being used. OR, purchase a plug strip that will turn off this power drain when the item is in "sleep mode." This is a new gadget I've recently purchased for my home.
  • As your light bulbs burn out, replace them with compact fluorescent lights (CFLs). Replacing six incandescent bulbs with CFLs can save more than 4% on annual energy costs.

Saving money on energy is a big plus. However, it's not only our own budgets that suffer when we don't practice energy conservation -- our society's budget suffers too. Pick a few new conservation practices that you can adopt this summer. Every little bit makes a difference.

Posted by Kathy Sweedler at 3:10 PM | Permalink |
Categories: Going Green, Kathy Sweedler
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May 11, 2009

Is it a good time to buy stocks? Real estate? Anything?

Last week at a workshop I was giving, one of the participants asked me if it was a good time to buy stocks. This is what I know for sure:

  • This is a better time to buy stocks than it was a year ago, when the Dow was at 13,000. Right now, stocks are about 35% lower than than they were then.
  • This is a worse time to buy than it was the first week of March, when the Dow hit its 52-week low of 6470. Stocks are about 30% higher now than they were then.

But is this a good time to buy? Who knows! That's the nature of the stock market. As Burton Malkiel stated in the title of his book, it's "A Random Walk Down Wall Street." Today does not predict tomorrow. We can guess, we can try to look for indicators. But no one really knows.

So what's an investor to do?

For that question, I do have an answer. Do the same things that you should have been doing a year ago, or 10 years ago. Follow the boring, tried and true investment strategies:

  • Dollar cost average
  • Diversify
  • Keep an emergency fund so you won't be forced to liquidate investments at the wrong time.
  • Determine an appropriate asset allocation for yourself.
  • Rebalance to maintain that asset allocation.

Want to know more about sound investment strategies? Visit the Choose Investments section of our website, Plan Well, Retire Well: Your How-To Guide at www.RetireWell.uiuc.edu.

As I'm fond of saying in my workshops, investing is like horseshoes. In the game of horseshoes, you can score points by either throwing a ringer, meaning that your horseshoe lands encircling the stake (3 points) or is within a horeshoe's width of the stake (1 point). If you try to throw ringers, you can easily end up with nothing. Many games have been won by just consistently throwing "close shoes". In investing, consistently getting "close" will also probably garner you better results over time than trying to pick the winner. Therei s one difference between horseshoes and investing. In horeseshoes, practice and skill will increase the likelihood that you can throw ringers. But it's much less clear that the same is true of investing!

Posted by Karen Chan at 9:01 AM | Permalink |
Categories: Investing, Karen Chan, U. S. & Global Economy
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