27 Feb 2008 by Chetan Shah.

Scenario :
ATT Wireless/Cingular Cell phone device stops working for whatever reason and you need a new cell phone but do not want to renew the contract.

Solution :
AT&T Wireless has a pre paid service called GoPhone. The prepaid service does not require the subscriber to sign up for 1 or 2 year contract which is a norm for the other AT&T wireless plans. You can sign up for a GoPhone Service here and select the phone device which you want. Once you receive the phone, insert your old phone’s SIM card in this new phone and switch it on. That’s it. You got a new phone without signing up for a contract and still keep your old number.

Questions / Comments are always welcome.

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24 Feb 2008 by Chetan Shah.

I primarily use my home computer for internet browsing, emailing and personal document management purposes. Most of the time my computer is powered on when I am home. Once it dawned on me that I should be donating my CPU time when it is just sitting idle doing nothing. After some research on the web I bumped onto World Community Grid which enables you to donate your idle CPU time for research purposes. I know SETI exists but I am not a big fan of finding extra terrestrial life when we have a lot of issues to deal with at our “earth” home.

I have been using their software for more than a year and never has this software been intrusive or hampered my normal work. To its credibility it is sponsored by the IBM. There are lots of interesting details on the website which I will not mention here as I believe that if you are interested you will take the initiative to visit the site.

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23 Feb 2008 by Chetan Shah.

Covered call is a very simple options strategy to generate cash from your existing long stocks in the brokerage account.

What is a covered call ?
My Options blog entry explains “Call” option in detail. If you have long position in a security, you can sell calls on that underlying security. By selling a call on the “long” underlying security, you are executing a covered call strategy.

Why sell a covered call ?
Selling a covered call is a credit activity, i.e. once the transaction is executed, the amount for which the call was sold is credited in your brokerage account. It is a great way of generating extra cash on your existing securities. This is in addition to the dividends which you may get from the underlying security. By selling covered calls you can effectively reduce the cost basis of the underlying security also.

Risk and mitigation:
Being a conservative investor, I consider getting “assigned” for a covered call a risk. My intention is not to get assigned as I want to repeatedly sell covered calls on the same underlying security, once my existing covered call expires. In order to mitigate this risk, I try to sell covered calls which are deep out of the money.

Additional Considerations :
There is no guarantee that a deep out of the money call will not become (deep) in the money call. For a highly volatile stock this can translate into losing money if the current price of the stock is way higher than the strike price of the covered call.

Despite the above risks, selling covered calls is a simple options trading strategy which any investor can execute on a regular basis to generate additional income from their long stock positions.

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21 Feb 2008 by Chetan Shah.

Protecting one’s credit should one of the topmost priorities of any individual in this highly “credit” driven world. Identity theft can literally ruin one’s personal finance life for quite sometime. Hence the need to protect one’s credit report by all possible means.

Most of banks, insurance companies and credit reporting agencies are offering “credit monitoring service” so that the individual is notified when someone looks at their credit report, this typically happens when an individual applies for a loan, credit card, cell phone connection etc. In the event that the individual did not authorize the transaction, this service helps the individual to immediately notify the bank/police that someone tried to steal their identity. While this is a good service to utilize, I think freezing one’s credit report is an efficient and cheaper option.

By freezing one’s credit report, no one can view your credit report until you “thaw” it. Thus preventing anyone from getting a loan, mortgage, credit card etc on your name without your authorization. Once the credit report is frozen, I do not see any need of subscribing to a credit monitoring service as it is redundant if not useless.

When an individual submits the request to freeze her credit, the credit reporting agency issues a personal identification number (pin #). In future when the individual has a need to get a new credit card, mortgage etc., all she needs to do is call the credit reporting agency and mention her pin# and other personal details and if all data supplied by her is accurate the credit reporting agency will temporarily lift the freeze (thaw), the freeze can be lifted for the duration specified by the individual. The individual also has an option to selectively lift the freeze. I.e : if she knows that she is going get the credit card from Bank XYZ then she can mention that she only wants to lift the freeze so that only Bank XYZ can look at it, this way her credit report will appear frozen for all other companies.

Agreed that there is a one time charge to put the freeze on the report and a charge to lift the freeze but I think it would be unwise to try to save 30-40 dollars and potentially spend a lot more to clean your credit report after an identity theft incident, leaving aside the mental stress that you will have to go through.

Steps to freeze credit report are dependent on the state in which you reside. Please click on the link to determine the steps for your state.

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19 Feb 2008 by Chetan Shah.

I know it is not one of the coolest thing to do on an ongoing basis but as we are becoming more and more dependent on data, whether it is entering personal finance information, blackberry data sync, outlook data, word documents etc taking regular data backups plays a very critical part in our digital lives. In the event of a hard drive crash if you cannot afford to be dead in water because you lost your personal data you need to have a data backup strategy which is efficient yet simple.

It does not need to very complicated but you need to take care of the following aspects.

- Data should be stored off site.
- Data should be secured.
- It should be easy to get to in the event of a hard drive failure or for whatever reason.

I will handle the security aspect first. Before taking a backup of your data make sure it is encrypted. There are lot of utilities available. I personally like AxCrypt. I have been using this utility for at least 18 months if not more and never have had a problem. It uses 128-bit AES encryption which is more than enough encryption for small people like me. This utility provides you with a capability of generating a pass phrase to encrypt the file. I strongly recommend using this feature as using a random key as a pass phrase just makes life for a thief next to living in hell to decrypt your files. You can store the pass phrase wherever you want. Just make sure that you don’t try to memorize it, because chances you won’t be able to memorize it. Axcrypt has other cool features too but for the curious, supplying with the axcrypt link is all what is needed.

To store data offsite, I use Mozy.com, this is a great utility to take offsite backups. You can schedule your backups and the mozy agent will do the rest for you. It is a free service if your data is less than 2GB. I almost started taking backups using Norton 360, as it does allow you to take off site backups but the next requirement of mine ruled it out.

Mozy.com has a web interface (Norton 360 does not) which allows you to download any/all your files from anywhere. Thus in the event of total loss of your computer, all you have to do is logon to mozy.com and download your files on a different computer and you should be ready to go. Remember you will still have to install axcrypt on that computer to actually start using the data. Also, you should be able to retrieve your pass phrase. Hint : Best place to store your pass phrase is in an email with a proper subject on it.

If you have lots of media/images to be backed up, I would not bother encrypting and storing it off site, the good ‘ol CD burning process works just fine. I give more emphasis to actual data then media/images, so I am sure you may have a better backup strategy for those type of files.

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17 Feb 2008 by Chetan Shah.

For example :
There are total 10 rows in a worksheet (Let’s say : Sheet 1). Only 4 of them are visible. The other 6 are hidden (using the row–>hide feature)

You want to copy only the 4 visible rows to a another excel worksheet.

Following are the steps which will allow you to achieve that :

1. On Sheet 1 which has hidden rows, hit F5.
2. On the “Go To” dialog box which appears, click “Special” button.
3. Select the “Visible Cells Only” radio option.
4. Click “Ok” button.
5. You will notice that all the visible rows are selected.
6. Hit “Ctrl-C” on the Sheet 1.
7. All the visible rows will have the dotted border.
8. Go the sheet (Let’s say : Sheet2) where you want to paste these rows.
9. Hit “Ctrl-V” on Sheet 2.
10. Done!

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