Parchayi.com - Personal Finance Simplified

How much more is America paying for crude compared to Europe thanks to the falling dollar?

Last year Crude was at 60$, 1USD=0.74Euros. Today Crude is at 132$, 1USD=0.63$. Doing some simple math, Americans are paying 120% more for oil, while the EU is paying only 88% more than last year.

What about 5 years ago? I couldn’t find Crude prices for the exact date but the average for the year was 27$. So Americans are paying 3.9 times what they used to for crude, while Europeans are paying 2.8 times what they used to.

However be mindful that inspite of the steep increases in gas prices, Americans still pay about half what Europeans pay for gas at the pump. No wonder they have small cars, more diesels etc. which is what is happening in the US now.

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Here is how to get Lifelock (a service that puts a Fraud Alert on your behalf at all the credit reporting agencies automatically every 90 days) for Free. Go to their Enrollment Form and enter ‘ or 1 or ‘ with the quotes included and voila - the service goes down to 0$ annualy. Wonderfull programming from a site trying to protect your identity!

Just so you know these guys are being sued for misrepresentation of services and their CEO, Todd something or the other has had his identity stolen at least once and maybe as many as 20 times according to some reports. So don’t go posting your SSN online, on TV etc. like him!

Just so you know, you can get your credit report for free from http://www.annualcreditreport.com and your credit score for free just by opening a WaMu Credit Card account and if you are interested in improving your credit score, check out my previous posts on Credit Score Whoring.

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I just ran a morningstar X-Ray on Parchayi and my investments now and the stocks are exactly 60/40 US/International. International investments are 48% in Asia (more than 2/3rds in India) and 34% Europe.

The portfolio is still heavily large cap weighted after I sold off all my stake in Panera Bread. I still haven’t reached my simplification goals to reduce the number of stocks and funds owned because I can’t decide what funds to dump.

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