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I am not the perfect employee and don’t claim to be. I do work hard and get my work done. If I do run late, which does happen when my daughter doesn’t cooperate or traffic gets snarled, I make doubly sure that I get down to work as soon as I get in and I get in as soon as I can.

However, this is not apparently very important to other people and I’m beginning to realize this. There are several people in our department that are habitually tardy. One fine example was this morning where one person, who is possibly the worst offender, was an hour and a half (!) late. She comes in with her fast food breakfast bag (stopped along the way) and gets down to checking her Yahoo! mail account. After firing off a six paragraph e-mail to whomever, she is ready to get down to business. It’s now two hours later than she should have begun working plus missing a weekly meeting held every Monday morning.

How does anyone justify this? I can see running late, though not at the frequency of some others, but at least make it look like you made an attempt to get here on time. Don’t have your fast food breakfast bag sitting on your desk showing that you even stopped along the way. Don’t fire off a six paragraph e-mail on your Yahoo! account the first thing. That can wait until at least you’ve done a little work, lunch would be even better. If you’re not going to work hard, at least give the appearance that you are. There are times for all of us when our productivity could be better. But don’t flaunt it by coming in 90 minutes late, then eating breakfast, then firing off personal e-mails, and then getting to work. Maybe.

I hate calling 411. The fees that carriers charge for information calls are astounding. On your mobile phone, they can be as high as $3.25. So I do everything I can to avoid calling information. Luckily, there is one totally free method and one method that will cost $.20 or be free depending on your phone plan.

The totally free option is to use 1 (800) Free-411. Call the number and you will hear a 12 second ad before being connected to the service. That’s all you have to do. No charges to your phone bill. If you want to be connected, you have to pony up for whatever the advertiser is selling (according to the website).

The other option, if you don’t have a pen handy or if you don’t want to buy something, is to use Google’s SMS service. Basically, you send a text message to GOOGL (the website now says GOOGLE, but I’ve always used GOOGL) with the information you need. Business name and zip code or city/state will usually do the trick. What you are doing is basically running a Google Maps query via text message. Google will then send you a text message back with the results of the query. The service is free, but you’ll have to pay for the texts in and out if you don’t have texting as part of your plan.

But that’s not all that the Google SMS service can do. On the website you can find example queries to find movies, stock quotes, weather, dictionaries, and other items. You can even query Froogle (Google’s not very good shopping search engine) if you wish.

There are some other entries if your phone is capable of using Java and you have a data plan through your carrier. Google Maps for Mobile (coverage here) is a wonderful tool that basically puts Google Maps in the palm of your hand. It can even show current traffic maps if you wish. TechCrunch has another competitor to Google Maps, a service called Tellme. Tellme is voice activated software that basically does the same thing as Google Maps, allowing for directions, maps, and search but by using your voice rather than typing in search results. The product is currently in beta and limited to Sprint and Cingular customers. However, Tellme was acquired by Microsoft yesterday, so I’d imagine that the software will become much more available in the near future.

So, there are several options other than dialing 411 on your phone and hoping that your telephone company is nice enough not to totally rip you off.

Free Money Finance has an excellent article up on buying a car via the web. He has several helpful hints on how to play one dealership against another. The article was originally published in a national magazine (nice!).

I will definitely use his suggestions as I purchase my next car, likely this fall. I used the web to contact several dealers when I bought my current car, a 2001 Hyundai Elantra, but I just used it to research the car and contact a couple of dealers.

One issue I will have is test driving. The car that I am currently looking at (the Honda Fit) is apparently in short supply in the Sport trim. The Honda dealer closest to me closed and the next closest is a terrible dealership to work with. I may have to find another dealer to test drive the car, assuming that they have a Fit Sport.

I’m also looking at the redesigned Elantra, I’ve had no problems yet with my current car but it doesn’t have enough cargo room to transport both our 3 year old and our 50 pound dog. The Fit is a hatchback, so it solves that problem plus it gets about 20% better gas mileage. I also like the Toyota Yaris, but the cargo room on the sedan is even less than the Elantra and the hatchback is ug-lee.

I’m also doing the smarter thing and looking late model used cars in the same price range. I think I may be able to get a Pontiac G-6 with around 20,000 miles for the same price as a new Fit Sport. It’s a bigger car to haul stuff, but it also uses more gas. I like the way it drives (we already have one) but it would depend on how many miles the car has. GM’s 100,000 mile warranty on 2007 models is a huge check in it’s favor. The warranty is one reason I am seriously considering the Elantra as well.

It would be all over if VW hadn’t pulled the diesel engine out of it’s Golf/Rabbit model. If I can find a low mileage Golf TDi, neither the Fit nor G-6 stand a chance.

But go check out Free Money Finance’s suggestions, he may be able to save you money on your next car! (it helps to read that sentence in dealership commercial voiceover voice).

CNNMoney has an example of the rare lottery winner that knows how to handle his sudden fortune. So many people that get so incredibly lucky have no idea how to make their millions last and have so much stolen right from under their noses that a lot of them end up in bankruptcy.

Brad Duke, 34, from Idaho won a $220 million Powerball jackpot in 2005. He took the lump sum, which amounted to $85 million (post-tax). He managed five franchises of Gold’s Gym in Idaho, so he knew a little something about managing a business and sticking to a budget. He decided he wanted to be a billionaire.

He hired a professional financial type to invest his money. He invested $45 in municipal bonds for safety and $35 million in aggressive instruments like oil and gas wells. He says he’s worth $125 million today and after a year and a half looks to be a billionaire in 12 years.

The only small problem with that projection is that it assumes that the markets continue to rock for the next decade and that oil and natural gas don’t have any price decreases. Projecting out a decade and a half is tough enough, but especially when you don’t factor in the business cycle or the gyrations in commodity markets.

He seems to have the smarts to make it to a billion, but I hope he just doesn’t get too aggressive when the markets turn south. Everyone looks like a genius when the markets are doing well, the true genii are shown when the markets are not.

He’s done very smart things like paying off his debts, not buying a huge house, and even buying a used car. He’s also set up college funds for everyone in his family and started a family foundation with $1.2 million of the earnings. He’s giving the maximum under the Gift Tax rules every year so his family can pay down their debts as well.

He seems like a nice guy with his head on straight. I just hope he doesn’t end up like this.

First, let me say that if you are not reading Yahoo!’s new Personal Finance section you are missing a ton of great content. Every day when I check the markets a new article catches my eye. Today’s installment is entitled “10 Things Your 401(K) Provider Won’t Tell You” and it’s an article from Smart Money.

Most of the things you can’t do anything about (provider fees, fund classes) but there are several that do require you to check on.

The article has some advice regarding not only target date funds, but also diversification within your 401(k) and how to pick amongst the many choices that most funds offer.

I was posed that question the other day. The banks and some experts have a general rule that 30-40% of your take home pay should be the limit for housing.

You should be able to pay the mortgage, have enough to eat and do the things you want to do, and save up to have 6 months of savings available if you lose your job or get in an accident or something like that.

I have a lot of trouble telling people to buy a house when they are not already saving enough each month to cover the difference in payments. That represents the breakeven without all of the extra home costs: furnace goes, washer starts spewing water, etc…

People on the whole don’t like to sacrifice and telling yourself you’re going to make huge sacrifices to afford a place to live is the first step down the road of trouble.

The main argument against renting is that you are “throwing your money away” every month and building equity for the owner and not yourself. While that is true, generally real estate grows at about 1-2% over inflation. We’ve had some great years, which means it will average out at some point. You can do better investing the difference if that is really important to you.

And taxes should never be the cart that pushes the horse. Doing something for a tax break that might be worth 10% of the cost (my effective tax rate this year was 7.93%) skews people away from rational decisions with emotional arguments.

That’s not to say there isn’t a lot of benefit of owning your own home. We do because we need the space and a three bedroom apartment would cost about the same as our mortgage. But we also live in an area with an incredibly low cost of living. If we were out on the coasts, or even in my hometown of Chicago, I don’t know that we’d be owning a home right now. It just wouldn’t be worth it.

The agency dilemma is an often studied issue in management classes. Basically, the dilemma states that an agent will do what is in their best interest more times than they will do what is in the best interests of the principal if the principal is not watching them like a hawk. In a stock market context, management are the agents of the shareholder principals and their job is to do what is in the best interest of shareholders.

This has failed again and again as management has gorged themselves on rich pay packages while the Board of Directors (the shareholders’ representatives) have been asleep at the wheel. Backdated stock options are another symptom of this broken system that rewards agents at the expense of the principal.

I’ve previously blogged on another large section of the principal-agent problem in response to a Ben Stein article. He’s back with another excellent article on how management has completely turned the buyout process on its head to enrich themselves at the expense of shareholders.

There is no better example than the current battle over Caremark RX. Caremark is the largest pharmaceutical benefits manager, which if you have prescriptions filled via mail you know what they are. It’s a big local story because the spurned suitor is one of the largest companies in St. Louis. Basically, Caremark’s CEO shopped his company to suitors that met two conditions. The first was that he would keep his job. The second is that the company would personally indemnify him from any suits due to backdated options that enriched Mr. Crawford, his son, and other executives to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars.

CVS, the drugstore chain, who desperately wanted to get Caremark’s mail-in order business to help compete with Walgreens which started their own PBM. They agreed to Mr. Crawford’s conditions and set the price of the merger at $48.50/share. They also gave huge change of control agreements to most of Caremark’s executives so that if they lost their jobs in the merger they would be taken care of to the tune of tens of millions of dollars. Oh, and for negotiating the deal Mr. Crawford would receive $50 million.

Seems pretty sweet, huh? Well, if you are a Caremark executive it is. Shareholders got hosed in the deal. The price of $48.50/share was 21.6% below where the stock traded a month prior to the deal. It also banned Caremark from seeking higher offers and included a $650 million penalty if the deal did not go through.

Enter Express Scripts, who offered 25% more than CVS. The Caremark board refused to even listen to the offer. They cited the breakup fee and the fact that the deal was already done in refusing Express Scripts’ offer. What they didn’t cite was more telling. Express Scripts refused to include large payments to Caremark’s executives or offer golden parachutes. They refused to indemnify Mr. Crawford for the sins under his watch (which makes me wonder if this is the primary motive for the deal?). They made an offer that was better for the shareholders but worse for management. And management stuck its fingers in its ears and hummed.

The classic principal-agent dilemma personified. This is what happens when shareholders (and their “representatives”, the Board) are asleep at the wheel. Unfortunately, most large shareholders, the mutual fund companies, don’t want to upset the apple cart and go along with management as well so the individual shareholder is left out to dry.

Unfortunately, there is no real fix in the era of mega-global corporations. Congress has trotted out fixes but they won’t work. Giving massive equity to management didn’t work either and led directly to the stock option scandal. It seems that as smart people come out with ways to fix the current system, smart people on the other side come up with ways to exploit that system. Wall Street is (and always has been) a chummy atmosphere, which is why the Fidelitys of the world don’t want to upset the apple cart because it is their friends that they would be outing.

I don’t know what the solution is other than to have shareholders take back the companies from executives. But that ain’t gonna happen any time soon. And the Crawford’s of the world will continue to get their windfalls from the skins of the shareholders they are supposed to be representing.

Ah, it’s that time of year again. Like Free Money Finance who posted a great article on rebalancing, I am also rebalancing my portfolio. As I stated in my post on this last year, my target allocations break down as follows:

45-55% Domestic Stocks
35-40% International Stocks
10-15% Real Estate

I further break down international stocks into emerging and developed markets. I also break down domestic stocks by value and growth.

Formerly, I rebalanced every quarter, but I have been pretty lazy this year. Most asset classes went up around the same percentages last year, so none of my allocations got totally out of whack. But inertia will only take me so far, so it’s time to get down to the dirty deed once again.

As of December 31, 2006, I had 55% in domestic equities, 30% in International equities, 2% in Cash (unreinvested dividends from my ETFs) and the remaining 13% in Real Estate. My Real Estate percentage is spot on, but I need to shift some of the domestic money to international equities and use the excess cash I generated to buy more international funds.

One of the international ETFs that I love but will lowering my percentage is symbol EEM. Right now, it is about 10% of my portfolio. When it took off, it was as high as 13% before I trimmed it back a little. I will be trimming it further to about 8% of my portfolio and may go as low as 5% at some point. It’s been a great ride, but I’m primarily a value investor and it makes me nervous. I think there are tremendous opportunities in the developing world, which is why I’m still investing in it. I am just taking a little profit.

I also believe heavily in international markets in general, which is one reason I have such a high weighting in them compared to a lot of analysts. I think a lot of the international markets that have been weighed down for years will be the growth engines of the next fifty years (my investing horizon) and will present great opportunities. I also want to diversify outside the US and especially outside the dollar, which I think will continue to weaken with our current account and budget deficits not going away any time soon. Most of the money that I will be putting into international stocks will be placed in an International Dividend fund (PID).

Later, I will continue with checking to see if your plan is working.

I took a governmental budgeting class for my Master’s degree with the city manager of my town, so I got to know him a little bit. We live in a suburban area, so I’d imagine it’s an easier spot to fill than the towns in rural Oklahoma profiled in this NY Times piece.

However, the point is still valid that it’s not a fun job. For those that don’t have city managers (I didn’t until I moved here) they’re basically an unelected mayoral position that actually runs the city functions. Basically, they are the CEO of the city. We have a mayor as well, and I’m not sure what his job is besides being head of the City Council (maybe that is his job).

Like CEOs, the city manager is responsible for everything from budgeting to potholes in the road. But he makes a heck of a lot less than the CEO of major corporations.  The article says the average salary of a city manager is $97,075, which seems like a great job until you realize it is a 24/7 endeavor. It’s also less than many schools and hospitals pay for similar jobs overseeing their operations.

One city manager interviewed, who complained the job was “too political” (well, what did he think), summed it up pretty well.

“You can’t go to the grocery store, cafe or convenience store without someone telling you they have a leak in the front yard or a pothole in their driveway,”

A lot of you may not know who your city manager is and that is a shame. Unfortunately, it’s the city managers that do their jobs well that run into this problem. The position should seek feedback from the community in the same way as elected positions. However, doing that opens you to the “can you do something about this?” problem. It’s the ones that don’t do their job that have the easiest time (hmm….).

All in all, I’m not surprised that fewer of my generation go to work for government. We grew up in the shadows of Watergate, Iran-Contra, and Monica. Most of my generation would just as soon work at Wal-Mart than take a government position. A lot of the really bright ones that would go to government skip that step and work for not-for-profits if they want to make a difference.

On the other hand, being a city manager can be very rewarding. Watching a city thrive under your leadership is very gratifying to the ego. And while it’s harder to know that than if you ran a business and could measure profits, there is a real tangible benefit for the citizens of the city if a city is well run.

Last year, my first post was yelling at people not to get a refund anticipation loan (RAL). The basic reason is that the annualized interest rate on such loans can be as high as 250%. Well, it seems that Jackson Hewitt has decided that RALs just aren’t the end-all-be-all. On my home from work, I spied a billboard touting….wait for it….. loans based upon your last paycheck. It’s not even W-2 based. Based on your paycheck stub and that’s it. They do calculations and estimate your tax refund and give you a “loan” for that amount.

Amazing. Soon, you’ll be able to get a loan in February based upon withholding just for January. Or, why wait that long? They could tell you what to withhold and give you a loan based upon the estimated tax refund for the year.

You’re probably wondering what happens if you get your loan and go somewhere else for tax return prep, right? Well, they’ve got that covered.

When you are approved for a Money Now Loan, there is no out-of-pocket payment required for tax preparation because all fees will be deducted from your loan proceeds

But of course, the “fees” (interest) you pay will be based upon the full amount of refund, not the amount less tax prep fees.

As these tax prep firms continue to prey upon those that are not fiscally literate, I will continue to point out the abuses. The Pentagon has banned RALs for troops along with other high interest rate loans because of the effect that it can have on troops. Maybe it’s time to do the same for all other Americans?