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I just finished up reading a very insightful book called “The Option of Urbanism: Investing in a New American Dream,” by Christopher B. Leinberger. The main focus of this book was that America will start to fall behind the rest of the world economically if we do not switch to a denser, walkable and transit based society.

In the book Leinberger starts out by saying that before the invention of the car cities were very compact and dense. One could only travel as far as they could walk, so this made it necessary for all things to be close by. Stores, work and home all needed to be located close to one another for the sake of convenience. Even when cars started being produced they weren’t something that was owned by every family.

It wasn’t until the World’s Fair of 1939 and 1940 in New York that the idea of owning a car became something that all Americans wanted. At the fair, General Motors set up a major exhibit called “Futurama.” This exhibit “showed radio-controlled, automated fourteen-lane highways crisscrossig the country with three speed limits (depending on the lane) of fifty, seventy-five, and one hundred miles per hour.” Over the course of the fair it was estimated that 27 million people saw this exhibit, and most were very impressed by it. The exhibit promised that this vision would become a reality by 1960.

According to the book, there were two major contributors to the massive expansion of the suburbs. The first was the end of World War II. Many soldiers came home and immediately started to have children. They started to look for a new kind of lifestyle, and the suburbs seemed to offer just that. The other major contributor was the passage of the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956. This act built the new 46,837 mile freeway system that currently covers the entire country. It was finally completed in 1991. This also helped make commuting from the suburbs to the city that much easier.

In this new society, only the rich could afford the suburbs, and the cities were filled with the poor. Many of the traditional downtown department stores left for the suburbs because business had become so bad in the city. As people moved to the suburbs and found out that they had much more space and privacy, they naturally told their friends about this paradise. After hearing such wonderful things, the friends moved out too.

Leinberger argues that while initially suburbs seemed to offer what was being promoted as the “American Dream,” it actually led to a lower quality of life. With sprawl, people are forced to drive until they qualify for a place to live. For the poor working class this can mean driving hours each way just to get to work. More time in the car means less time with family, and this would lead to a poorer quality of life.

Leinberger has suggested a rational solution to this problem. He essentially echoes what many have been saying for the past few years. We need to be more like the Europeans. He suggests having a central city that is linked to the outside suburbs via some sort of rail/transit line. In the suburbs, the transit center would be what the rest of the town was built around, thus making it convenient for all people to access it. He also suggests that instead of spending billions daily to fund a war that supports our sprawling and congested lifestyle, we should instead be using that money to create better mass transit systems. Until people have better transit options, they will continue to use their cars because that is the only way.

In conclusion, I think that it will take a number of things for the United States to switch into a more transit based society. Once gas prices reach certain heights, people will start to consider transit to be a more viable option and not something that is strictly used by the poor. With increased ridership numbers, the cities should recognize this pent up demand and will infuse more money into the public transit system. All in all I really enjoyed this book. I think that Leinberger made some excellent points on how to fix some of our transit problems. Unlike other books, Leinberger’s solutions actually seem feasible and quite likely to be implemented in the near future. I would highly suggest reading this book if you are at all interested in urban development or environmentalism.

I have been with Cingular/AT&T Wireless for about two years now and have never had any problems with them besides their service black hole in my girlfriend’s apartment. It is interesting though that I have suddenly run into a bunch of problems with them all at once.

This most recent weekend I found that all incoming calls were going straight to my voicemail. They weren’t ringing on the caller’s end, and my phone wasn’t ringing either. Even worse, my phone was not being notified about these missed calls or new voicemails in my inbox. I also could not receive text messages.

Initially I tried to troubleshoot the phone on my own by turning it off and then turning it back on again. This did not seem to help at all. My next course of action was to call the people at AT&T to see if they had any solutions. After spending about three minutes navigating the phone tree, I found out that I had to call from a different phone in order for them to troubleshoot my cell. Since my lunch break was almost over, I decided that I would just have to bring it in to my good friends at the local AT&T store.

When I brought in my phone, the AT&T rep initially powered down the phone and restarted it like I had and then tried calling it. No luck. Then he decided that it must be something with the SIM card. He popped open my phone and pulled out the SIM card. He left and then came out with a brand new SIM card. He put the two cards into this machine that looked very similar to a calculator and transferred the data from one SIM card to the other. After this he put the new SIM card in my phone and powered it back on. He gave my phone a call and it magically started ringing again.

Thanks AT&T!

As a final side note, they did not even charge me for the new SIM card.

I know I wrote a review earlier about my trading account with Optionshouse.com, but I thought that I would add some screen shots to go along with the review.

Many of these screen shots will be too large to fit into the blog properly, so if you click on them you will be able to see the full size version.

This first screen shows the options chain view. In this view you can see the bid, ask, change, volume and open interest. If you click on any of the call or put prices a black box such as this one will pull up and allow you to choose many different trade options depending on what you want to do. The screen is actually much larger, but I wanted to just show a snippet to give an idea of what the chain view looks like. One nice feature of this view is that it refreshes every five seconds and flashes a different color for each option that changed in price during the last five seconds.

The second screen showes the options ticket. This is where you can initiate your trades. It also gives you the choice of either doing one trade at a time, or you can add different legs to the trade as well. A nice feature that is shown on the bottom of this image is that the total cost of the trade automatically updates each time you alter your trade.

In the third screen, you can see the watchlist which is located on one of the sidebar tabs. The watchlist is nice because it allows you to be able to see all of the stocks you are most interested in. One downfall of the watchlist is that it has to be refreshed manually. While this may be a nuisance if you need to have the most up to date quote, I can see how it would put a strain on the site’s bandwidth if it were in real time. Either way, it is still a nice feature.

I will admit to being a terrible options trader, but I can see how this site would be a great trading platform for an experienced trader, especially with the fixed commission structure.

So today my girlfriend and I went to the AT&T store at the local mall and inquired about the fee that had been assessed on my account. For those of you who don’t remember, I was charged an $18 “change of account responsibility fee.” The fee seemed pretty ridiculous, especially since we were not informed of this prior to making the switch. The AT&T customer representative went back and presumably talked to the manager to get the go-ahead and came back a few minutes later. She said that I would receive a credit to my account either on this bill or the next bill. She said that she had to send an email out to make it effective. Hopefully this low-tech way of applying a credit to my account actually goes through, or else I will have to make yet another trip down to the store.

So the customer may not always be right, but I guess in this case they are. So if you get charged with this totally out of line fee, please make your way down to your local AT&T store to right their wrongs.

Apparently my blog program only lets me type so much before it starts to freak out, so here is the rest of my post…

… I guess the main issue I had with the book was the writing style. The book didn’t seem to fully captivate my interest like a book on this topic should have. I suppose some of it could be attributed to the fact that I read it 15 pages at a time on the bus on the way home from work.

In short, the Virsnieks plan is to essentially buy low, sell high, and use the rent from your tenants to pay the mortgate. To seasoned real estate investors this probably seem like a no brainer. If you fall into this category I would not suggest this book to read. If this seems like a groundbreaking idea, then this book would probably be a great read for you. Personally, I had a teacher in high school of all places enlighten me on this idea first, so the majority of the ideas covered in the book weren’t really much of a surprise to me. I felt that I got some good words of wisdom from the book, but not enough to justify the amount of time invested in it. I wish I would have just read a few choice chapters and been done with it.

As I mentioned a few posts back I read a book called “How to invest in Condominiums” by Andris Virsnieks. I did not finish this book entirely, but this is mainly because the book did not fully captivate my attention. Mind you that I read this book because I have been very interested in investing in real estate in one form or another for quite some time.

According to the title of the book, it covers such topics like:

• Select the right condo
• Make the real estate market work for you
• Attain positive cash flow
• Reduce your tax basis through depreciation
• Live rent-free and retire early

Judging by the cover it seemed like an interesting read. After getting a ways into the book it seemed to cover the same stuff over and over again. I guess that since I had been thinking about investing in real estate for so long I had already thought about many of the strategies that Virsnieks covers in the book.

The basic investment plan suggested by Virsnieks essentially goes a bit like this. First you must select a brand new condo. A remodel or apartment conversion just will not do. He does not believe in buying an older unit to upgrade into a more valuable one. Not only must the condo be new, but it also must have high demand for the units. If there is not high demand for them, then it may be harder to sell them later. The other main point that the author reiterates throughout the book is the value of hiring a property management company to take care of all the dirty work for you. Virsnieks claims that the management company typically takes about 9% of the rent for their services, but it is well worth not dealing with all of the hassles. He says that by purchasing a new condo and hiring a property manager, then you will only have to spend about 40 minutes a month on your investment. That 40 minutes will be spend going over the property management statement and depositing the check in the bank.

Virsnieks makes the whole process sound quite easy in the book, and indeed it should be. There are a few problems that I have with how the book is set up though. The majority of his purchases were made back in the 1970s, so it is somewhat hard to wrap my head around the purchase of a $23,950 condo in Seattle that rents for $265/month. These days a cheap livable condo in Seattle goes for about $175,000 or more. He also makes mention of mortgage payments in the 13%+ range, which is unheard of these days. If you applied everything on a strict percentage basis, it would all probably match up about the same, although in Seattle I believe that condo prices have increased more than rents have.

I normally don’t use this blog to rant about a company, but AT&T wireless especially pissed me off today. For the past few months my girlfriend of about 2 1/2 years have been thinking about switching her phone over from her dad’s family plan to a family plan with me. It just seemed to make sense for us, especially since I don’t go through a ton of minutes and she was sharing hers with three other people on her old one. So just last week we went into AT&T to get everything moved over.

It seemed like a pretty painless process. All in all it took about five minutes. They checked all of our IDs and got our numbers and then transferred her number over to my plan and set us up with a new minutes plan. It all sounds good until I took a look at my bill this morning.

Apparently AT&T charges what they refer to as a “Transfer of Service Responsibility Fee” which costs $18.00! $18.00 to move a number on a computer from one account to another. No credit or background checks needed to be done, just a straight transfer! It seems like they should be encouraging you to sign up with the family plan since you will most likely keep your service there longer. Instead they just penalize you! Rediculous! I wonder if they charged her dad as well?

One more thing that made me pretty upset was that they got rid of almost all of my rollover minutes. Over the past 12 months I had accumulated over 3,000 rollover minutes. When I switched over to the family plan they took away all of those minutes except for 700. What happened to keep the minutes that you pay for?

The account summaries that are posted along with this article are taken from my actual bill, so I am not making this stuff up. I’d be curious to hear if anyone else has had similar experiences with AT&T and whether or not this is standard practice on the other wireless carriers.

There are many different investment services out there to choose from. Most tend to be geared towards the experienced trader who wants to use limits and stops in their trades. Well Sharebuilder.com is one of the few sites that is geared to a more novice audience. Sharebuilder, which I believe has recently joined forces with ING Direct offers investors to set up up automatic investments that allow them to purchase stocks in whole dollar amounts instead of individual shares. By doing this, beginning investors can invest in partial shares of Google or Apple instead of having to throw down a bunch of cash for a single share.

Through the program, you schedule Sharebuilder to make regular investments in a given stock on a certain day each month or week. One negative thing about this system is that you cannot specify an exact time to initiate a trade. At some point in time during the trading day, Sharebuilder will acquire the shares for you. A good thing about this plan though is that it allows you to make regular investments in a given security. This will allow you to be able to smooth out price fluctuations since you will be investing over a wide range of times.

Sharebuilder also offers some standard brokerage features as well. For an additional price you can make trades in real time just like you would with a more “full-service” broker. They also offer options trading and margin accounts as well.

Don’t you hate it when you find this great stock to invest in only to find out that your available cash balance is too low to make the trade worth it? Well Sharebuilder has a great feature that will easily solve this problem. What they have created is called Express Funding. With Express Funding, you can “place Real-time Trade orders with cash directly from your checking/savings account, eliminating the wait to process your deposit.” It costs $5 to do this, but if you have an Electric Orange account set up through ING Direct the fee is waived.

Sharebuilder has set up three different account types depending on what kind of trader you are:

As you can see, with the advantage plan you are essentially getting trades at $1/trade assuming that you make 20 investments per month. To my knowledge that tops most other brokers out there.

If trading at regular intervals for a cheap price sounds good to you, I would highly advise you to give Sharebuilder a closer look. For a direct link to the site, click here.

When I went to return my most recent book to the library I decided to pick up a new one while I was there. The one that I chose is called “How to invest in Condominiums,” by Andris Virsneiks. I am only 19 pages into it so far, but I have a good feel for it so far. It appears that it will be fairly informative while keeping at a level that will be easy enough for anyone to understand the basic concepts. The author makes is very clear in the first few pages that investing in condominiums is not a difficult task if done correctly.

The sweet thing about this book is that it is a signed copy. That kind of surprises me for a library copy. Maybe someone was bored and decided to forge his signature into the book. The book was written in 2002, conveniently at the beginning of the real estate boom but I’m sure that the majority of this information can be applicable in any market environment. I also found it interesting that the author did his condominium investing in Seattle, which is the area that I am from.

A few weeks ago I mentioned that I had checked out a few finance books from the library. Well my checkout period is over now, and since I will be returning my book tomorrow I thought that I would take the time to write a brief review of the book.

I checked out two books, but I only ended up reading one of them. The one I chose to read was called “How Technical Analysis Works” by Bruce M. Kamich. I will admit that i didn’t make it through the whole thing, but I did make it through all of the topics that I was interested in.

In this book, Kamich does an excellent job putting the mysterious world of technical analysis into easy to understand terms that can be useful to both beginning and experienced traders. An experienced trader may want to read something a bit more advanced though.

Coming into this book I knew a little bit about technical analysis like moving averages and certain volume indicators. The book introduced me to a few new strategies that I have already started to use when analyzing different companies. The three strategies that I found most useful were trendlines, triangles, and areas of resistance and support. A few weeks ago I wrote an article about trendlines from what I had read in this book.

One great thing about this book is that Kamich does not simply tell you what a strategy means, but he also tells you how he uses them to trade. I found that to be very useful, because knowing what certain indicators are will only get you so far. Knowing when, where and why to trade is where your success will come from.

For me I found this book very helpful for the advancement of my trading strategies. The important thing to realize is that technical analysis is not the golden ticket to investment success, but is just one of many tools to use when analyzing a company.

Overall, I would highly recommend this book to someone who wants to know more about using technical analysis as an additional trading strategy.