A couple days ago my wife and I were getting annoyed watching some TV news story about the request for the second $350B of TARP authorized funds. The nerve of asking for more funds given the lack of accountability that has been applied to the first $350B just drives us nuts. How did any of the money “lent” out actually help things? No one can currently tell us!

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Yesterday I talked a little bit about the basics of trading covered calls. Today I want to record some of what we’re thinking of doing in terms of the strategy for our covered call trading. Please keep in mind that this is still just a plan and it may not survive first contact with reality.

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I placed my first ever order for an options trade today which I think bumps me up a notch on the capitalist side of the capitalist vs. frugality discussion common to so many personal finance blogs these days. Seriously though, it’s been a month or two learning process to where I felt comfortable doing doing this. Here’s some of the things I learned along the way.

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I started this blog in the last quarter of 2008 for a couple reasons. One of them was to act as a record of progress toward our geographic independence goal, so it seems appropriate to post a summary of how we’ve progressed in 2008 and what some of our goals for 2009 are.

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I recently read an article entitled The best (and cheapest) funds around which purports to tell you when to invest using mutual funds vs. ETFs based on a cost analysis. Unfortunately, they make a few too many generalizations that simply aren’t universally true and so I disagree with their results. (Though I do agree with their analysis of annual expense fees.)

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