financial hacking, part 1

[prog]

After two years of delay I'm finally taking the reins of my long-term finances, starting with the great basic investment information found at Fool's School.

I took the somewhat painful step of stomping out the rest of my CC bill, including the big transfer I took out to help pay my taxes last month. That I felt at all attached to the money which wasn't really mine proves, I think, that it was indeed better to excise it now than later.

I transferred all the money that my Harvard retirement account has accrued over the last three years into an index (located elsewhere within the same account shelter); specifically, one that apes the S&P 500. Because I like apes. They're not as funny as monkeys but they'll do. Also it seemed to have the winningest returns among the indexes that Fidelity offered.

Next I must decide how to route future Harvard retirement contributions; it's still set to shunt everything into that useless money market. (I already have a bank account that serves the same purpose, only with a better APY.) Strong likelihood that I'll just glop it also into that index too, but I'm not sure yet... more reading to do.

Then I will see about re-re-restarting a Quicken file for the umpteenth time in my professional existence. (At least my bank offers Quicken-readable account exports.) With this information in hand, I'll start making a real savings plan outside of retirement stuff, with the aim of building a real stock portfolio. This is really exciting to me. Woo woo.