The Sewing Mom

Monitoring your mutual funds and stock investments, how do you do it?

My husband and I both have mutual funds as part of retirement savings. We have owned shares in many different funds over the 20+ years we’ve been together, but we’ve never purchased or bought into a fund or individual stocks without having a financial advisor. I would never presume to be an expert on making my own Stock Picks anymore than I would pick my own mutual funds. Mutual fund can be even more difficult to keep up with than individual stocks simply because they are made up of multiple stocks.

I can use TheBuyList.com to see which mutual funds have bought or sold any particular stocks. I can also get specific analytics such as buy/sell percentages of any particular stock. I can let them do all the difficult research and I can reap the rewards. If I want to buy specific stocks instead of mutual funds, I can see what stock are being bought and sold by the mutual funds and follow their lead, if I so choose.

Investing wisely is very important to me. In the early days of our marriage, investments in mutual funds and their proceeds, allowed us to purchase our first home. In subsequent years, we’ve been able to use our mutual fund earnings to live on when we’ve needed to. Currently, knowing we have good investments and a plan for our future allows me to stay home and work on my own dream, sewing creatively for a living.  In our future, we hope to use our earnings from our current mutual fund investments to live on in our retirement. Using the right resources for investment research leads to wise investments.

Tags: investing, mutual funds, stock investments, stock research, stock tips, TheBuyList.com

Elizabeth at Mom Reviewsis having a contest that I just had to enter. Why? Because the prize is a $30 gift certificate to Baskin Robbins, one of my all time favorite ice cream destinations!

Having not been in this area a full year, I found that there are actually 4 Baskin Robbins locations surrounding my house! There are 2 locations in Plano, one in Murphy and even one in McKinney, Tx. There is even one I pass by almost daily and will be happy to use my gift certificate there to purchase the Chocolate Indulgence Cake for my husband, the resident chocoholic! Of course, the Oreo Cookie Cake is looking pretty appealing too!

As much as I’d like you all to go visit Elizabeth’s site and enter the contest, the fewer that enter, the better chances I have to win!

Tags: Baskin Robbins, contest, ice cream

I am relatively new to the world of blogging and in the 7 months I’ve been blogging, I feel like I’ve learned something new each and every day that I’ve signed on to my computer. I’ve learned that there are hundreds of thousands of bloggers out there which means that there are hundreds of thousands of blogs for readers to choose from. Subject matter covers everything from ballroom dancing to how to blog and everything in between. As with anything I do in my life, I like to know that my blogs are successful and success to me means that readers find what I have to say interesting. Now there is a great tool to help me know where my blogs stand in the world of all other blogs.

If you’re looking for a tool that uses real traffic to rank your blog and compares your site ONLY against other blogs, not other types of websites, please check out IZEARanks.com where you can sign up and get your very own simple piece of javascript to put on your site. This piece javascript is used only to collect actual traffic data. you can also choose to display a button on your website that will reflect your page views and number of visitors, or just your real rank (RR).

As an added incentive, IzeaRanks.com is giving away $1000 every week during the month of February to the blog with the #1 Real Rank that week. By the way, your Real Rank is an average over a 7 day period. So even if you have one bad day, your RR won’t be affected.

This is a great ranking tool to help you know how you’re doing compared to other bloggers, unlike Google’s PR (Page Rank) system that compares blogs right along side huge corporate websites such as Yahoo and Google itself. How is that fair? Real Rank, get a valid, fair ranking today!

Tags: blogging, Izearanks.com, page rank, Real Rank, traffic data

floral paisley bag, originally uploaded by sewingmom1.

My sister just finished creating this beautiful bag. I love it because it is fully lined and comes with pockets. It also has a fabric closure at the top for security. This is a perfect bag for Spring.

This bag is for sale. If you’re interested, please contact me by leaving a comment.

Tags: fabric, fabric bag, sewing