Parchayi.com – Personal Finance Simplified

Over the last few weeks, the Indian stock market skyrocketed after the elections and most of my Good Till Cancelled orders for buying INP are of no use now. I missed the opportunity to buy then and I might get in slowly at dips.

One stock I did acquire is Apple. Even though it is still below my average buying price, it is very close to breaking even and might be one of the few gems that might make some money for me going forward. Even though I own no apple products, I see everyone around me has them. At tech meetings at UVA, I see half the people carrying iPhones and I seem to be the only one with an HTC Touch Pro (or any WinMo phone for that matter). People will live with poor service form AT&T and no 3G coverage but they still want their iPhones. I went to an iPhone development meeting and it turns out you need a Mac to develop apps for an iPhone! And everybody wants to make apps for iPhones. So indirectly that is a driver for Mac sales.

My hopes are on a recovery of the stock market over the coming years and I switched from a state pension plan to the University’s own retirement plan (about 10% of salary is put in your account and fully vested immediately with no matching requirement from the employee). It costs the University less than the state pension plan (for which the University contributes just over 11% – 5% goes to you, vested in 5 years and the remaining 6.something% goes to the state)

The stock market made a comeback and a few days ago became positive for the year. Even though the jobless rate is expected to rise to 10% by the end of the year and mortgage rates are expected to remain low too, the market has been so badly beaten that some recovery is probably a given.

At the same time America is shooting itself in the foot by delaying immigration even more and making people who are employed (employment based immgration requires that you be emplpoyed obviously) wait a decade or more to get their green cards. In my previous post I pointed out several ways immigration reform could boost employment ant the economy. And it seems that there cannot be a better time than now.

Fewer people want to come to the US now as is evident from the lack of applicants for H1 Visas this year as compared to the last few years.

However instead of moving forward, immigration dates continuously move backward at an alarming rate. In my previous post I posted the dates from the April Visa bulletin. The May bulletin made all EB-3 (skilled worker, jobs that require a bachelors degree) unavaileble until October. The Jun bulletin moved EB-2 (jobs that require a Masters degree or significant experience) back to 2000 for Indians. That means that there are some Indians with advanced degrees who have been waiting for nearly 10 years!

Looking at the trend of visa applications, it seems that there are more than half a million pending applications. It looks like things will get worse before they get better and America probably needs some kind of legislation to help legal employment based immigrants, the guys who pay taxes, spend etc. and in general help the economy.