1. As some of you might know, I have my Roth IRA with Scottrade. I’m not going to go over how and why I started it right now since I’ve already covered it, but they have finally made a change that I’ve been waiting for. For a long time now they took away the ability to make an online transfer into the account because of some security issues they had in the past. They re-instituted these online deposits for regular accounts but not for IRAs for some reason (I was told because of the issue with tracking contributions for each year). Well, they’ve finally gotten their act together and I can now make a simple online transfer to fund my account.

2. There is an interesting article at Yahoo! about people tapping 401(k)s to pay bills. The very beginning of the article is what struck me. It says that one man “had little choice because he and his wife could not keep up with monthly expenses after American Express reduced the limits on three credit cards”. My first thought was… Why are they using their credit cards to pay monthly expenses in the first place? Someone should have noticed that there was a problem way before the only option was to raid a 401(k). If you’re racking up balances on your credit cards just to pay bills, then there is a problem. A novel idea would be to re-evaluate your needs and wants.

3. Another article caught my eye since I’ll be going back to school in the fall. It talks about an upcoming student loan crunch. It says that it could get tougher to get student loans since credit is drying up and lenders are toughening standards. One part of me doesn’t really care too much since it’s just another mention of another “credit crisis/crunch”, but another part of me was planning on taking out some student loans just as a back up since they’re usually at pretty cheap rates. For now I’m not going to get too worried, but it’s something that I’ll keep in mind going forward.

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