We woke up for the 2:30 feeding/diaper change and uhh haven’t really gone back to sleep since. (Shanna has been sleeping though. That’s more important.) This is one of the downsides to how early we go to bed. If that first sleep cycle was a good one it’s hard to fall back asleep sometimes. Later there will be napping.

But! Since we were both up… we had rather nice sex. I’m really enjoying all the possessiveness that is more permissible in monogamy. 🙂 He’s mine, Mine, MINE!!!! *cough* It wasn’t rock my world sex, but it was nice anyhow. 🙂 Then we talked schmoopily for a while. Then we started talking finance for a while. We decided during this conversation that it was just time to get up.

We are trying to figure out the balance between investing in a regular 529 account and a 529 independent account. For those of my friends with kids, check it out. A 529 independent account allows you to pay into an account as if you were paying for a kid to go to an expensive private school right now and that money basically turns into credit hours for the institution and you can use the credit hours later regardless of what the actual tuition is at the time. Very neat. The problem is that it is a gamble that your kid will want to go to a private school. There are a few hundred schools that are registered with this program and you can go to any of the schools on the list. It’s worth thinking about. Cause we are thinking about more than one kid it’s kind of interesting to wonder about whether one kid will want private or two or none or… ah! Where is my crystal ball?!

Then after doing a bit more research and talking about this I got off my heiny and looked into credit cards that will give us a higher rate of cash back (American Express has a fairly good card–5% back on groceries/gas/drug stores and 1.5% back on everything else once you’ve spent $6500 in a year). I couldn’t find a better card so I opened an account. Card is on its way.

Then I got around to opening the E-trade checking/savings accounts we have been talking about. They offer 3.3% interest on savings and 2.9% for checking. That’s way better than Washington Mutual Chase. Because they don’t have branches to visit they refund ATM fees so we no longer have to think in any way about finding branches. 🙂 Given that I do 90%+ of my banking online it doesn’t matter that much anyway.

I have folded laundry and I’m about to go put it away. After that I will put the diapers out on the line (I did that load overnight) cause the sun is coming up now and I can see.

Then I will come back in here and start researching renewable energy companies. We have a little bit of money we want to put into the market while it’s down and I think renewable energy is a pretty smart place to go right now. I may end up eating those words, but that’s my first guess. I need to figure out a)what companies exist b)which of them are publicly traded c) what are the actual specific technologies they are producing d)what sorts of dividends do they pay e)look at their previous history and how they are performing f)maybe look into their funding sources? Is there anything big I should look into other than what I am thinking of right now? I may start another entry later and edit it as I find more information if anyone is interested in seeing what I turn up. 🙂

And now! I go work on laundry. Not bad for 7:15.