Last week I wrote about my wife’s and my thoughts regarding factors to consider when picking a brokerage to use for investing the initial funds we’ll dedicate to achieving our geographic independence goal. I ended the last post about those factors with a promise to write about the result of our research and the decision we’ve made. Well, we’ve made that decision, as well as a bit of a plan for moving money around, and I want to write it all down so we don’t get confused about what we’ve agreed to.

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I was doing some research this morning to further compare brokerage firms and started to look into the yield we’d earn on cash given various choices. In doing this, I noticed that ShareBuilder has our cash in the Bedford Shares of The RBB Money Market Portfolio which is managed by BlackRock Institutional Management Corporation (symbol: BDMXX). Seems fine, but why is the most recent prospectus only showing performance returns up until December 31, 2006?

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ING Direct updated their website recently to reflect a drop in all tiers of interest rates that they’re paying on the Electric Orange checking account. The lowest tier dropped from a 1.00% APY to a 0.50% APY. I suspect there will be alot more of this all-around due to the recent Fed rate drops.

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Earlier this week I submitted the paperwork with my employer to change my whole paycheck to be direct deposited into high-yield savings accounts rather than an almost-no-interest checking account. The idea we’d had was to earn more interest on the money until we needed to use it elsewhere now that we’d figured out how to avoid running into the 6-transfer-limit that the US gov’t imposes on transfers out of such accounts.

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I’ve read a number of recent news items that indicate the government is thinking about taking action to push the 30-year fixed mortgage rate down to around 4.5%. I’m not sure my wife and I are their target market for any resulting action, but this is a lower rate than we’re currently paying on our mortgage and it may be by a big enough margin that we should be planning to refinance our home if rates do drop. I did a bit of research about refinancing and here’s what I found.

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