Usually, Jon’s the one who gets up in the morning and checks the Asian and European stock markets, for clues to what our market will do when it opens. But this morning it was me. For weeks, he’s been saying we should buy, and I’ve been pointing out that we have a $8800 tuition bill due in January. Finally, on Saturday, we discussed the fact that the market rose 11 percent last week, and decided we should probably buy before it rose much further.  

We still have to put some money in our IRAs to max them out for this year. And since I know we’ll do that at some point before April, we might as well do it now. So I decided to check the foreign markets, and if signs were pointing up, I’d put in an order to buy. If it looked like there would be a selloff after last week’s gain, I would wait. So I checked, and signs are, indeed, pointing up.

What should we buy? I want to buy an index fund, partly because I’ve been reading Vanguard founder John Bogle’s new book (more on that later). So I checked out Morningstar’s trusty ETF performance tracker. (I defined an ETF in an earlier post.) Jon only wants to buy stocks or funds with high dividend yields. So I identified two: First Trust Value Line Dividend Index, with a 3.71 percent yield, and Vanguard Value ETF, with a 3.48 percent yield.

Any other ideas?