Freelance Consultant's Diary

I have been discussing the working from home policies of corporations and clearly Yahoo did not know how to get work out of its employees .  I am actually pretty confident that if Yahoo (NASDAQ:YHOO) employees did not work from home effectively, it will be impossible for them to work in an office too.  The problem is not telecommuting; the main problem is that Yahoo has awful employees and they need to be fired. So with that in mind, look at what Google (NASDAQ:GOOG), its competitor, does.  Company spokesman Jordan Newman tells NYT , "I don’t think we’ve ever had a policy on that (meaning working from anywhere)......we do expect employees to figure out a work schedule with their team and manager. It’s not a free-for-all.”   According to the article, Google doesn’t require employees to work from the office. It doesn’t even keep track of who’s there. The notion seems to have never occurred to anyone.

I am sure if your income is only fifty grand and you have very little assets (or like a quarter of Americans, no assets, but credit card debt and student loans), you will see these millionaires are out of their minds to not be happy.  You probably even fantasize that you would be so happy if just your credit card debt was paid off and you had some money in the bank for emergencies , but trust me, the richer you are, the bigger your expenses, and what might be an year's worth of savings, for some people that is just one trip to Paris. Well, according to the Spectrem Group found that individuals worth $5 million or more are far more satisfied with their jobs, relationships and work than those worth $100,000 or less. Notice the important distinction here.  Instead of just talking about the millionaires (remember there are a lot of millionaires next door these days), they are talking about the so-called penta-millionaires . Before you get any wrong ideas about me, I am not a mil...

If you are like me and like to trade commodities like gold, silver, and oil (I have traded IAU, UCO, and SLV), you will simply need to do a lot more paperwork while filing your income tax return with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).  Even if you do your taxes using TurboTax, which pulled all my documents from the TD Ameritrade account, I was still stumped when it came time to complete the form related to these trades.  So this is how it works.  Unlike other equities that are simple buy/sell, the commodities are tricky.  Basically, the owner, iShares, of this exchange traded fund (ETF) sells a tiny portion of your holding to cover their costs, and that is why you will see that each month there are trades that you have not made.  In my case, the actual quantity was zero shares and the total proceeds were just $22. So how to calculate the cost basis?   I suggest that you plug the data in a spreadsheet.  In first column, list the 12 months.  In the...

Yes, the super-rich can lose a billion dollars to gambling , but I thought that was rare.  Elliott Orsillo, CFA, co-founder of Season Investments in Colorado Springs, tells CNBC, "One of my clients had $400,000 in credit card bills. He came to me because it was impeding his ability to fuel his jet. The credit card companies would not allow him to charge his fuel anymore."   If this were not true, I would have thought it was a joke.  I wonder if the wealthy are also "too rich to fail," that eventually someone bails them out.

During the late 90s, I found an awesome job that I loved, but it required a 75 mile commute one way, from Connecticut to New Jersey.  Yeah, it was mostly highway driving and I completed it in about 90 minutes or so each way, but with occasional delays, I was spending about 20 hours each week driving.  Around that time the Internet was just starting and my employer was terrified how their business of information collection and processing would be impacted by it, so they were very reluctant to embrace anything new, including telecommuting (which was emerging as new concept in the dot-com boom).  Since several employees were like me, eventually, they let us work one day from home, that we got to choose.  The company insisted on a separate phone line so that work calls could be redirected and an Internet connection, which was fine for me, but wow, it was awesome.  I got to sleep late, and a minute after my office closed at 530 PM, I was home.  It made such a di...