We’ve been in a sort of limbo this week, not quite yet having thought through how to modify our investing plans as a result of recent events. We still want to put our cash to use but are just not sure what brokerage to use to do it.

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I just checked my e-mail and saw that I had received an e-mail from Jeroen Veth @ Zecco Trading. The e-mail states that as of March 1, 2009, Zecco will cease to provide 10 free trades per month to accounts with a portfolio balance of $2,500. Instead, accounts will need to either have a portfolio size of at least $25,000 or make 25 or more trades per month.

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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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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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In part 1, of this series I talked about the top 6 things we’ve considered during our struggles to identify a brokerage to use for our initial investing process (as purposely opposed to trading) in our quest toward hitting our geographic independence goal. This post provides the other 7 of the the full list of 13 considerations. Keep in mind that this means all of these were less important to us than the first 6.

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