Hijinks Inc.

In this world nothing is certain but death and taxes.
- Benjamin Franklin

It’s tax season, kids! And you know what that means, right? Yeah, me neither. Anyhow, I’ve been rocking the tax scene for the past four hours and it has been pretty painful, I knew going in that I was going to have to pay in of course, and that it was going to be a lot… but it still hurts.

So, a mere six cups of coffee and $11,237 of deductions later and I think I’m in business. I now only have to pay in several grand and the world is a much happier place, I will take the time to try and lower that figure further before I actually file, especially since I’m in no hurry to pay the feds any of my hard earned money.

What about you? Are you getting money back, or paying in? Worse yet, have you not even started your taxes?!

My passive income for January was slightly lower than December, mostly because I had to pay for classes, my speeding ticket, and the bank cut my interest rate. Ah well, still not a bad start to the new year.

• Interest: $30.58
• Dividends: $11.53
• Credit Card Rewards: $13
• AdSense: $9.93
• Text Ads: $16.02
• Misc website income: $15

That rings up to a fairly respectable $96.06 for the month, I’m hoping to see an average of $100+ per month this year, we’ll see how that works.

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They say absence makes the heart grow fonder, but apparently that doesn’t apply to Google, although it is slightly reassuring to know that their server clusters don’t actually incorporate human hearts. I digress. Over the course of a few days I’ve all but disappeared from the hollowed pages of Google Search, major bummer, I used to be the number two result (also numbers 3, 4, 7, 12, and 42) when searching for ‘Aaron Nelsen‘ but now I’m stuck at the bottom of the first page of results, plus Hijinks Inc. doesn’t show up until page two.

In other news, banks cut interest rates because of the cuts the Fed made, and the market continues to be as unpredictable as an inebriated schizophrenic. Both of which are major thorns in my side.

Along the same lines, I’ve made more money in the past six months by changing a portion of my cash holdings from the US dollar to the Euro than I have from the stock market. That’s depressing.

Oh and I’m in the process of upgrading my iPod touch to the 1.1.3 firmware and attempting to jailbreak it, if I’m successful I’ll post instructions on how to rock that scene.

Today markets fell worldwide, will the NYSE follow suit tomorrow? My guess is yes, and it won’t be pretty. So look for the market to falter tomorrow, leaving us with a closing number well below 12,000.

Here is a breakdown of the losses seen worldwide today.

• Bombay’s Sensex -7.4%
• Frankfurt’s DAX -7.2%
• Hong Kong’s Hang Seng -5.5%
• London’s FTSE -5.5%
• Shanghai Composite -5.1%
• Tokyo’s Nikkei 225 -3.9%

I for one will be looking to pick up a few stocks at a healthy discount if the market does suffer.

Here’s the break down of my passive income for December 2007. I’m happy to report my passive income was slightly more than double what it was in November.

• Interest: $48.29
• Dividends: $11.29
• Credit Card Rewards: $32.10
• AdSense: $5.39
• Text Ads: $16.02
• Misc website income: $15

My total for December is $128.09, that’s an increase of $64.90 over November.

After using Mint.com for a few weeks, it certainly has grown on me. So I thought I’d give another go at reviewing it, now that I’ve spent more than a few hours using Mint.

Anyhow, they recently made some changes to their site (Build ph363.43), I have mixed feelings about the update. On one hand, I was excited to see that I could manually enter the APY for my accounts!

However, my inner obsessive self was disappointed to see that the Update button for manually updating my accounts was gone…

There used to be a nice Update button right there next to the Edit button, Mint! What have you done?!
Edit: The answer is here!

Minor things I know, but here’s the big kicker. Stability, Mint has gone a little janky since the update, now when I delete one entry from my alerts it hides all of them until I refresh the page, then they come back. Also, the email and mobile alerts I have set up haven’t been working 80% of the time, I might get the email update, but not the mobile one… or I may get it three days after I get the email. Rather annoying.

The Spending at the Pump feature on the Accounts page also seems to omit random trips to the gas station, one day it told me I’d spent $124 on gas, and the next it said $83. The truth is I’d spent like $113 for the month.

Then there’s the Spending Trends page, which random display little to no information , here’s what it told me my expenses were for the entire month of November:

Clearly, $48 + $64 do not equal $1,091. On top of that, I know I had more than 8 transactions for the month, that and I spent well over the claimed $1,091, after all I spent $948 at Newegg.com alone. The Spending Trends feature was working prior to the update, so hopefully they’ll get that fixed soon.

I’m still waiting with baited breath for them to start supporting brokerage accounts, I don’t even know if this is a planned feature, but if they ever add it I will be ecstatic. In fact, I might even do a little dance.

Another feature I’d really like to see soon is the ability to import/export transaction records. But I complained about that in my last review as well, so I’ll shut up now.