Saturday, July 16
I am up to my tits in numbers today. It started off with trying to take another whack at the taxes, which spread to organizing and putting away six months' worth of "to be filed" papers, which spread to a couple hours on Ameritrade trying to sort out why my numbers didn't match the ones in Quicken. Most of them ended up working after I went through transaction by transaction and manually updated the whole damn thing—I am a happy and proud Mac weenie, but Ameritrade and Quicken on the Mac just can't get along—so it's pretty close, now, and the one account that's still off is a rollover IRA that I can't really touch anyway. I guess I'll take a brief dinner break and then go back in time to figure out why the share figures don't match up. It's nice to be back playing with Ameritrade again, though. It's like eBay, but for grownups. I was pleased to see that several of my stocks had quietly been kicking out dividends while I wasn't looking, so I had a little pile of play money there that I didn't realize I had. Swept some into the checking account to put out some financial fires, and set a trap to buy a little something on Monday if my target takes a small dip like it probably will.
I should be doing the thing what started this whole Ameritrade session: looking up the cost bases of several stocks that were the unfortunate victims of "reorganizational events". Some baby Bell would split into a million pieces, I'd end up with like three shares of some useless faux-company, and then they'd do a 1-for-10 split, charge me twenty bucks for the "reorganizational event", and fip! little shard-shares are gone. So I have to go do forensics on them, figure out what they were worth and what I paid for them, in order to write off the losses on my taxes. I probably won't bother, honestly; we're talking seriously small fauxtatoes.
I'm thinking about doing a little profit-taking on the Apple shares, but I can't bear to part with any of them right now. Maybe when the iPhones come out.
4:49 PM
