If you’ve been patiently awaiting more posts on investing…sorry for the delay! It’s just that it takes me a good long time to write something I consider “publishable” when it comes to investing.

Anyway, Steve over at Adventure Money has tagged me, along with four other personal finance bloggers, with the following meme. It’s Friday, my posts are lighter on these days anyway, so I’ll oblige here:

Five things you might not know about me

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Chances are, you haven’t heard of Stave Puzzles. I hadn’t either, until I read about them in a recent issue of the Robb Report. Picture handcrafted, wooden jigsaw puzzles created with diabolical tricks in mind, and you’ve got exactly what Steve Richardson, owner and Chief Tormentor, has to offer.

I think a business like this would be great to have someday. Steve clearly loves and is good at what he does and has loads of fun. The business model is unique yet simple to understand, and the business itself can be operated from a place like beautiful but remote Vermont. I’m making an assumption here, but it’s presumably also very profitable. I’m pretty sure there are people out there (and not just puzzle junkies) who’d be willing to pay for a high-quality, artistic and entertaining product. Take a look at the selection he has to offer, and keep in mind that the company appeared in the Robb Report, a magazine about luxury goods.

Personally, I’ll have to hold off on buying any such puzzle until we have more space (living in a 850 sq. ft. house with two French bulldogs doesn’t bode well for the fate of any jigsaw puzzle), but Stave is definitely a place I’ll have to keep in mind for the future both as a shop and a source of inspiration for business ideas!

I saw a story on Yahoo! a couple of days ago that reported that consumers prefer PPOs and HMOs to CDHPs. Having used all of these options myself, I thought the article was pretty interesting, especially because I happen to prefer CDHPs. The article was quoting a recent study conducted by the Center for Studying Health System Change.

Some of the key points found in the study were that, surprisingly, almost 40% of all workers who are offered a CDHP plan have only that plan to choose from. Yet, when workers are offered a choice of plans, less than 20% opt for a CDHP.

I’ve written about my experiences with Lumenos’s CDHP and how I discovered that all my coworkers had opted for PPO and HMO plans instead, because they didn’t understand how the CDHP plan worked, even though the plan cost less and gave much more flexibility than the other two options we were offered. The following quote from the Yahoo! article, pretty much sums it up:

Experts have said the plans will bring down health care costs because they make patients more financially accountable for their spending decisions. However, the study shows that people aren’t necessarily anxious for that responsibility, said Jon Gabel, a study author and vice president of the center. “Most Americans are risk averse. They don’t like making financial decisions.”

It just goes to show that whether you’re trying to find a stock to invest in, find lower auto insurance, or choose a health plan, you can often do better or save more money if you put in some extra time and effort to understand the options available to you. Our employers currently don’t offer a CDHP plan, so we’ve opted for a PPO instead. It’s fine, no big complaints, it certainly covers much less than Lumenos did.

That being said, a CDHP plan might not be necessarily right for everyone. Someone left an understandably angry comment on my Lumenos CDHP post, which was directed at the company for not covering a particular type of treatment. While figuring out an insurance plan is about as interesting as watching paint dry, it’s important to find one that’s right for you.

T-bill rates took an unexpected dive this week. Even the daily treasury yield curve, which showed a slight drop on Monday (the day before the auction) of 8 basis points for the 28-day bill didn’t foreshadow the 28-day APY’s drop from 5.39% last week to 4.95% this week. The 91- and 128-day bills also declined, though not as dramatically. Here’s the updated graph of Investment Rates for each T-bill (click to enlarge):

I don’t have a solid explanation for why the 1-month rate dropped by so much. There’s been speculation that the Fed will cut interest rates next year, but I wouldn’t have guessed that the rate for the next month’s period would be affected as dramatically. There hasn’t been much speculation over at the Fatwallet thread on Treasuries (always a good thread to check for info and updates) on possible reasons. Anyone have other ideas on what’s going on?

I’ve been laddering my 28-day investments using the automatic reinvestment option on Treasury Direct, so about 1/4 of my total investment in 28-day T-bills will be affected by the new rate. The tax-effective yield on it is still a solid 5.65% and higher than I can get elsewhere, but obviously much lower than the 6.16% from last week.

If the trend continues, I might have to reevaluate my automatic reinvestments and determine whether getting in on the 3- and 6-month T-bills would be a better choice before the Fed makes any further comments.

A couple of days ago, I received a question from a reader asking how to use the IF function in Excel for a particular scenario he needed to do at work. I thought other people might benefit from having a short tutorial on this, so I’m providing it here, divided into a few parts.

The first part (here) will go into the basic IF statement, and subsequent parts, such as how to use nested IF functions with other logical operators, will describe how to use it in slightly more complicated scenarios or with additional features. For example, the reader’s question had to do with using an IF statement given two conditions, e.g. if a number falls between two other numbers. I address those in the separate post in the link above.

But, let’s go over the basic IF function here, first.

Let’s say that you have a series of numbers in Excel like this that represent sales figures that 10 of your salesmen have made this quarter, in column B:

Before we go further, if you’d like to work through the examples yourself, here’s the raw data you can copy into an Excel worksheet. First, open up a blank excel worksheet. Next, highlight the table below. Copy it, and then go back to your excel worksheet. Go to cell A4 (or another empty cell, if you want to put the data elsewhere), and then select “Edit” from the menu bar. Select “Paste Special” and then “Text” from the popup box. Click “OK”. The data should appear in your Excel worksheet just as it does above.

Ok, now back to the tutorial.

Next, suppose that you give them a bonus commission of 12% if they’ve exceeded a threshold value, say, $100K. Rather than going through each sales figure yourself and manually checking to see if that number is greater than $100K, and if so, calculating the commissions in another column (column C in this case), you can use the IF function to do this for you.

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