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Ok, I am going to rant a little now. Feel free to tone out if you wish.

As you are probably aware, many banks and online stores allow you to use some type of electronic bill pay. Simply put, this allows you to specify a payee, amount, and date to make a payment. The bank will then send a (physical) check on your behalf to the payee on that date. Pretty nifty.

I use these for everything: rent, credit card payments, transfers to savings, etc. In fact, I have even used these to pay friends and family back when I owe them money. For example, my sister and I will buy gifts for our parents and I will pay her back using this method. Quite easy. I do not think I have actually written a check in three years since I started completely using this system.

Ok, history over, now rant time.

When creating a payment I have noticed banks, institutions, and otherwise will allow you to choose the date to send it. For one-time or manual payments this works groovy. It will show you (normally on a calendar) how long it takes to mail, including weekends and holidays and when it will arrive. Perfect.

Recurring payments are not as nice. I will use my rent as an example. It is due on the first of every month. It takes five business days to mail. This means it must be mailed the prior week for every month that the first is not on a Friday. Given, month lengths I have specified to have it sent on the 26th of each month. This makes it late, but my apartment does not count late payments until the fourth.

Now, image this is December with super holiday time. If the 26th is Christmas Day Observed, then the payment is not processed or mailed. Ugg. Results equal late payment. (I did not do the math, so this might be a bad example. Point is, holidays screw it up. Moving on.)

Currently, I monitor these months and manually modify their schedule. I am assuming there are a couple days a year where money is transfered earlier than needed because others follow a similar system.

Better Solution. Can I specify a due date (last day of month)? The system would then determine how many days ahead it needs to send the payment – considering holidays, USPS schedule, and such – and send accordingly.

This is a win for the consumer and the bank. The customer gets money in their account longer and more accurate payment processing. The bank gets more money in their accounts and less headache from missed payments.

Alternatively, actually using an ETF process would be even faster and accurate.

I could not resist. You have to watch today’s Wallstrip.

Today at work one of my coworkers asked if I was an owner of a specific company and what I thought about the company. I told him I was, and we talked for quite a while giving our thoughts on its qualities and failures as a stock. While talking to him I was trying to decide whether or not his question was too personal.

Is telling somebody the securities in your portfolio at the same level of invasion of privacy as telling them how much money you make? Or your age? Your shoe size? I have actually been trying to decide if sharing this information was out of my comfort level for quite some time. I guess since I continue to answer these questions means I am ok with it for now. I refuse to answer what my purchase price was or how large of a stake I own though. Where do I draw the line?

These questions are some what hard to answer since I love personal finance and investing oh so much. I would love to sit down and talk out these issues with somebody and learn more about them, their securities, their methods, their successes, and their failures. For now, I guess I must make my decision.

I was also thinking if there was a point where a person should be morally responsible for sharing this information. For example, if one was a Senator or running for Senate (state or federal), would it be advantages to reveal this information publicly? Doing so or not has many implications. I am fairly certain American Presidents and candidates have to do so by law. What about senior exec for corporations? Would this information reveal their loyalty to the shareholders? What about a fiance?

What about all of you?

When I was in school I worked on campus for what we called Telecom. We fixed the phones and Internets when they were not working properly. It was a great experience as a first technical job. I met some interesting individuals many of which are my friends still to this day. It was one of those interesting work environments where if you left the room for more than 15 seconds without locking your computer, when you got back a picture from uglypeople.com would be on your desktop. The ‘Oh my God’s were priceless.

On of those interesting young chaps I met there was Tri (Steve) Nguyen. Steve has become a finalist in BusinessWeek’s Best Young Entrepreneur in Asia. This is pretty funny for me because last time my friends talked about him, we were remembering how he was trying to show his Karate dominance over a concrete wall (the wall one by the way).

Congrats Steve and best of luck on your businesses.

Today like most Mondays I went to work. How about a little background to help you understand the situation.

My office is inside what used to be a house. In the back, we have an ‘employee’ entrance which is just next to a carport. This can all be nicely viewed from Google Maps. Ok, nicely is relative since you cannot see the back door. Let’s just say it is in the NW corner of centered building. You will have to trust me.

Now for the fun part.

This morning I was walking South on Washington (the street on the left), when I noticed the parking meter which is normally right outside from the rear door was replaced with hole. There was also a dirt trail down the sidewalk which splits my office and the carport (in the shadow area on the map) for about 20 feet. At the end of the dirt crumb trail was the parking meter which – without drawing conclusions – might have filled the hole nicely. There were a few quarters on the ground and the meter’s head was not to be seen. It may have been kicked off in a fit of joy, but I am no detective.

My guess, if I was to try to come up with what kind of situation would cause such a horrific disaster, would be that the ground was so mad at the parking meter – they may have been fighting – it threw it up. So forcefully in fact splattered the sidewalk and cut its head off. The head was probably eaten by the carport to never be seen again. I hope I never piss of that ground or carport.