When it comes to investing, there are two things you can control – how much you pay in fees and how much you pay in taxes. With fees, it’s pretty straightforward because fees are disclosed up front. A brokerage charges you $x per trade, a mutual fund company pulls x% in expenses, and both are required by law to make those very clear.

Taxes are slightly different. The tax code can be complicated and it doesn’t help that there are so many different “types” of investment accounts from 401(k)s to Roth IRAs to your plain vanilla brokerage account. When it comes to investing, what you buy and where can be just as important as what you buy.

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Ahhhh, I messed up! Sometimes it pays to get a professional and just this past tax filing season I made a small mistake that turned into a minor inconvenience that, luckily since I caught it, didn’t get any worse than it could’ve. What happened was that I messed up my taxes and was underreporting my business income by a significant amount and so I had to file the awesome 1040X Amended Return form in order to repair the error (since it was in my favor, which is bad). The plus side is that I found it before the filing deadline so there will be no penalties.

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MBH talks about the latest round of 0% financing offers – this time from furniture stores.

Nickel writes about how HSBC Direct is trying to gain new customers by offering a teaser 6.00% rate until April 30th. I remember other banks doing this same move a year or so ago.

Flexo runs into another problem with TIAA-CREF and his SEP-IRA involving incorrect contribution coding.

From the Department of Obviousness, FMF posts “advice” from Money Magazine: If you want your house to sell faster, drop the price. It’s a brain trust over there at Money.

JLP takes a look at the impact of a few bad years on your investment returns.

Him of Make Love Note Debt wonders if he should move his SIMPLE IRA because it sounds like the brokerage handling it isn’t being 100% honest with him and his fellow co-workers. Anyway, the full story is at Make Love Not Debt as well as a list of his options, weigh in if you can.

I also wanted to throw a shout out to LAMoneyGuy, who hit 100,000 page visits, congratulations! Everyone go visit his site and give him a few more.