Mazda’s starting up their Zoom-Zoom Live! promotion again where they let you drive their cars on their tracks and give you points based on your time trial results, points that are worth “prizes.” There are four challenges: Performance Challenge, Matched Time Gymkhana, School of Zoom, and Jinba Ittai Experience; where you can earn a maximum of 50 points for meeting the time and even 5 points just for trying.

The locations for Zoom-Zoom Live are San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston, Houston, Dallas, Orlando, Miami, Chicago, New York and Washington D.C. Check out the site for the dates, I’ll try to be at the Washington D.C. site, Fedex Field, between Nov. 12-13. They also give away all sorts of goodies on site as well just for showing up. Signup, my friends went last year and said it was awesome.

Last year there was a $30 charge, this year it appears to be free.

Over dinner last night the topic of what the best return on investment renovations were and I went with the generally accepted addition of a full bathroom as the highest return. After scouring the internet, I found this great site that listed their opinions – I’m inclined to believe, if not the absolute numbers, that their relative place on the list is probably accurate. Tops is the addition of a full 2nd bathroom, average cost of $12k, and a payback of 100%. The worse is to finish the basement, which my friend correctly identified, at a cost of approximately $8k and an average 15% return.

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I saw an article today on CNNMoney called the top things homebuyers need to know and I don’t think they tell you enough on some very key and critical points. For example, they give the advice that you should clean up your credit because it’s important in the lending process (it, among other things, determines your interest rate) but it misses a key fact: You shouldn’t be trying to improve your score, you are merely checking for errors and inaccuracies. You can’t improve your score significantly in a month or two, the equation just doesn’t work that way, so don’t look for a magic bullet but do check for errors which can improve your score since the errors should be investigated and removed within thirty days. There are more…

A lot of these “things” are common sense, such as “Don’t buy if you can’t stay put” (#1) and “Hire a home inspector,” (#10) and don’t need much explanation to get the full point across. But here are the ones that need just a tad bit more information.

4. Don’t worry if you can’t put down the usual 20 percent.
This doesn’t mean an option-ARM is what you want (where your monthly payment doesn’t even cover interest), know what you’re getting into when you sign on the dotted line. Don’t buy into the hype of the hot housing market… buy smart, or wait.

5. Buy in a district with good schools.
The idea behind this nugget of advice is that you should be considering your exit strategy. Are you planning on living there a few years and then renting it out? Do you want to live there, sell, and upgrade? Good schools means your target customer base improves to include families with children. If you’re planning on renting it out and earning some income, you probably want to buy a place in a city with young professionals.

6. Get professional help.
You don’t need an agent to find a house, but you need an agent to go over the paperwork, fill out a contract, and does all the legalese stuff to make sure you aren’t getting screwed. Plus, you aren’t paying for the agent, the seller does. Perhaps you can knock off a little from the sale price by going without an agent, but what if you mess up the contract? And if the other guy has an agent, you might get steamrolled later on for something… the agent has to earn that commission right? Don’t go into a gunfight armed with only your wits.

8. Before house hunting, get pre-approved
They don’t stress this enough… if you are not pre-approved, in this blazing hot housing market, you are not even going to be in the race. You could offer tons of money, but its all fairy tale money because the pre-approval proves to the sellers you have enough credibility with a lender that you could get a loan. The pre-approval process will demand you show pay stubs, bank account records, etc; it’s pretty exhaustive. Pre-qualifications (one step before pre-approvals) are worthless, don’t waste your time getting one.

What do you think of my clarifications? Am I totally off-base? I’m very interested to hear your comments on this one.

Internet is expensive. Comcast will give you a promotional rate of $20/month for their High Speed Internet for six months and then jack up the price to an uncomfortable $45/month until the end of time. While $45 isn’t really that much, you want to cut down on costs whenever you can, especially with enormous mortgage payments looming every month. It’s also a lot when you consider, of the 168 hours in a week, at a bare minimum 45 are spent at work (or traveling), probably 56 is spent sleeping (8 hour nights may be optimistic) , leaving 72 possible hours. If I spent half of my waking, non-working time glued to the internet… that’s $1.25 an hour (not that expensive right?). Or I could use free internet…

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Update 11/1: All these offers are no longer available but you can find the latest promotions here.

Before I bought a house I was very very concerned about my credit score so I didn’t take advantage of free money offers from credit cards. Every time you apply for a card the issuing bank pulls your credit and a lot of inquiries negatively impact your score. Now that I own a home, don’t anticipate any other large purchases, I’m going to get back into the free money game.

First offer: $100 Visa Gift Card from Schwab/MBNA Visa card, it used to be $150 but as savvy saver says, $100 is $100 (and more than $0). I’ll consider it a housewarming gift from Schwab to me.

Second offer: $100 card credit from Sony Card, unfortunately I already have a Sony Card so I can’t cash in on this. Shucks.

Third offer: 2 free nights at a Choice Privileges award night hotel from Choice Privileges Visa Platinum Card, I’m tempted but I don’t know if I’ll be needing two nights… at least not yet.

So of the three I could find, I’ve only applied to the first. $100 is a nice chunk of change to get for nothing right?

I bet most of you know that ING doesn’t have the best interest rate, but did you know that there are five other banks that match or exceed ING’s piddly 3.15%? Current top dog is Presidential Savings with a 3.75% APY with their Checking account in second with a 3.5% APY (Emigrant Direct tied for second with a savings of 3.5%). The best list of updated interest rates I know of is Flexo’s at Consumerism Commentary, he keeps that list as up to date as possible and it contains other useful information, such as Quicken and MS Money accessibility.

My personal experience with online banks is limited to ING and Emigrant Direct, I discussed both as emergency fund safe houses a while back and an alternative to Certificates of Deposit. Personally, I go with the higher interest rate but ING is the better known name and has a much prettier interface. Emigrant is very austere which lead many to think it’s not reliable, which I believe is a mistake. A deposit into Emigrant Direct takes approximately five business days to clear while a withdrawal takes a mere two days (I withdrew at 1am once, it cleared within 48 hours). With ING, a deposit takes five days to clear and a withdrawal takes anywhere from two to three days.

ING can offer a lower interest rate because it already has a sizable customer base; it no longer uses that interest rate as a hook. It will be quite some time before ING catches up to Emigrant, if that ever happens. For those of you thinking ING will match Emigrant, I suggest you make the switch to Emigrant because that’s a race ING won’t win unless a major shift in market share occurs.

ING Direct has a referral program, if you are interested in picking up $25 (I get $10) for opening an account, drop me an email.

Ha! Just kidding. Unless it’s a dire emergency, no one should consider touching that 401(k) because it’s tantamount to robbing your future self… and your future self would be pissed. So why did 45% of a 200k polled by Hewitt Associates opt to take the cash after leaving work? Perhaps it’s because they don’t know the ramifications (it’s taxed as income and then you’re nicked for a 10% penalty!) of their actions? If you look at the dollar amounts it’s even more staggering: if you’re 401(k) value is under $10,000, that little devil telling you to raid is three times fatter than the angel! (72.5% take it out).

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The sixth edition is out! FMF has a very formidable collection of posts today and here are the ones I strongly suggest you read:

JLP has a good rule of thumb to figure out if you’re on track: Age times income divided by 10 = net worth. Chew on that.

Everybody Loves Your Money, a new personal finance blog, has a great post those of you with kids should read: Teach Your Kids to be Smart With Money.

As usual, you should peruse the list and read all the ones that look interesting, because they’re well written, but those two are particularly interesting.

You probably know about Roth IRAs (post-tax dollars grow tax-free) and you probably know about 401(k)’s (pre-tax dollar growth to be taxed on disbursement), but what if the two gave birth to a kid? Then you’d have the new Roth 401(k) (it may be renamed to the Roth ESRA) that will come screaming out the gates January 1st, 2006 (the plans were authorized all the way back in 2001). There are still some details to be ironed out by the IRS in the months to come but below I’ll detail some of the key features that everyone is sure about and how this option (which can be used in addition to your current retirement accounts) may be a good one for you.

This article was originally published two months (5/18) ago but I pushed it up to the top since CNNMoney had a headline article about these new plans recently.

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One of the beauties of writing a personal finance blog is that you get exposed to a whole lot of other personal finance blogs – you want to keep abreast of what your ‘colleagues’ are talking about. The wealth of information out there is staggering because you get essentially full reports of what other people are doing and seeing. Lately I’ve read a bunch of individual accounts of ridiculously counter-intuitive and downright devious tactics used by various financial entities (banks, credit cards, etc) that I think should be thrown out into the open and exposed for what they are: legalized fraud.

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