From: Home Insurance Blog

- Don’t Open Multiple Credit Lines

If you’ve already got two or more credit cards, chances are you should stop right there.  Especially when it comes to reward cards from specific retailers, opening multiple lines of credit can be burdensome and even dangerous.  While they may claim to offer awesome rewards and perks, they usually won’t do much in the way of boosting your credit score; these cards are easily forgotten about, and as such, are not very useful for common day-to-day purchases.

It’s much wiser to stick with one or two main credit cards to keep your bill payments under control and easy to monitor.  Having to worry about multiple cards won’t do you any favors in the sanity department either.

- Pay Balances in Full

Although it’s fairly obvious, it’s surprising how hard this practice can actually be.  Paying your balances off in a timely, consistent manner though is the best way to maintain a high credit score.  If you have an especially large outstanding balance, getting it paid off as soon as possible, in full, is another great way to boost your credit score as well.  If balances are left unpaid, they’ll not only hurt your credit score, but will accrue greater interest over time, making it that much more difficult to get out of that financial hole.

- Use a Prepaid Credit Card

If you’ve got numerous outstanding balances on other cards, a change in your credit approach once you’ve paid these off may be in order.  Using a Green Dot prepaid Visa credit card, or other similar prepaid card, is a great way to ensure that you don’t end up in a terrible financial situation.

With a prepaid card, you are able to maintain a line of credit while also building your score without having to worry about creating an outstanding balance as you can only spend what you put on the card.  Another benefit to a prepaid card is the lack of interest rate, instead users just pay a $4.95 maintenance fee a month.  Otherwise, there are no other fees associated with the card allowing you to build your credit without having to worry about high interest rates, overspending, or calling creditors.  In other words, this is a great training credit card for anyone who may have experienced irresponsible spending in the past.

No matter your financial situation, practicing and maintaining good credit habits is something we should all strive for.  The unfortunate reality of credit cards is that they’re easy to use and just as easy to abuse.  By heeding these three tips, and in researching some other great ways to practice safe credit usage, you can make sure you stay on top of your finances and out of messy, stressful debt troubles.

Bottom line: If you use Google AdSense and/or belong to an ad network, you will get paid quicker.

Of all these possible reasons, none are more common, overlooked, or simple to rectify than one standard problem: many of us don’t think about our investments on a daily basis. While we certainly take pains to curb our spending and are aware of the investments we have out there, we don’t regularly remind ourselves of the realities. We don’t regularly think about our long-term finances on a day-by-day level.

In addition to making our funds seem more tangible, having a daily interaction with our money can also confer more practical benefits. It can reassure us and make us feel more in control. It can give us a means of self-assessment by which we analyze our spending on a micro scale. It can, furthermore, provide us the ability to know where our investments stand and to change them if they are faulty.

How can we achieve this daily element and accomplish these goals? Here are a few tips:

-Find a good online banking service. Managing your money on a daily basis requires, first and foremost, having a bank capable of providing the information you need in a quick, painless, and comprehensive manner. For this reason it is important to seek out the best online banks so as to insure that your finances are always at your fingertips.

-Invest in index funds. Many people don’t know how to follow their investments or interpret the ramifications of any changes that may occur. For these people – as well as for anyone who wants daily management to be as easy as possible – index funds always present an excellent option. By investing in an S&P 500 index fund, for example, you can make it easy for yourself to track the fund in the paper, on television, or on the radio.

-Make it part of the routine. Ultimately, no matter what tweaks you make, doing something every day requires incorporating it into your routine – and personal finances are no exception. Whether you check your accounts every morning at work or every night at bed, having a consistent routine is often the best way to insure responsibility going forward.

These are just a few of the ways you can go about taking more responsibility for your finances on a daily basis. While doing so is not difficult or time-consuming, it can nevertheless provide real long-term benefits for your peace of mind and your bottom line.

It’s a  free full-featured checking account, with debit card, paper checks and all the usual (but no branches, of course). And it’s powered by non-other than The Bancorp Bank, which has its hands in many of the new direct banking initiatives.

Smarter Bank has a rewards program that pays down your student loans. Free online banking, bill pay, free debit card and an ATM network.  I will open up an account to see how it can help me pay down my student loans.

From Pando Daily, I hear about Lemon.com. Lemon is a mobile app that stores all your receipts for purchases digitally. The great thing is that it is available on Android, iPhone, Blackberry. This looks like a good personal finance tool.

Lemon allows you to take a picture of your receipts with your phone and extract data from them to analyze your spending habits. It focuses on the part of your spending habits that are the hardest to track: Small cash and debit card payments throughout the day. A cup of coffee here, a burrito there.

I wonder how Lemon compares to receipt start-up veteran Shoeboxed.

Here’s a clip:

What does that look like in practical terms? First, I have a strategic plan that I revisit once a month or so. Dorky, I know, but it helps me stay centered in the winds of career chaos. If I get job offers that I don’t have a gut instinct about, I can hold them up to the test of my strategic plan. Does this fit into what I said I wanted to be doing with my energy? Or will this be a distraction from the path I want to be on right now?

I balance these calculations with my projected income—also a feature of the plan—which helps me know when I need to be hustlin’ harder than usual, or when I can be a bit more choosy about the jobs I take on. There’s nothing like realizing you don’t have enough money in the bank for some basic expense—an experience every freelancer has from time to time—to teach you that keeping a chart on your projected income is totally worth the annoyance.

 

SmartyPig, an online social savings platform, today announced a pair of big changes. The Des Moines-based company will go by a new name, Social Money Systems. It also will offer a new product, GoalSaver, which is a customizable, social savings, transaction-focused platform for banks that utilizes a bank’s brand and regulatory and compliance systems to create what the company calls a “complete solution.”

SmartyPig.com (the name for Social Money System’s consumer-facing product) and GoalSaver, its white-label version, are banking products that allow users to save money online, set goals, share their progress on social networks and then receive incentives such as merchant e-cards or debit cards.

In fact, many workers who are easily qualified to take solid positions at big companies choose to work for small companies because they know their leverage and upward mobility will be greater. Their incentives for hard work are the drive to become one of your executives or chief officers. Other employees need stronger, more tangible incentives, like Roth IRA retirement plans and health benefits. Here’s a small list of what you may be able to offer:

Health care and retirement funds. These are some of the first benefits of a job that an employee will be interested in. The reason why is fairly obvious. Health care is expensive; and retirement options give you life-long security. When you offer it you’re showing your employees that you value them and are willing to make an investment in their well-being for the sake of your company. For employees who need dental or vision care, or other, more expensive medical procedures, having this taken care of can be a great relief and will make them want to work harder.

Stock options. If your company has gone as far as an IPO and are a publicly traded business, offering your employees stock options is an excellent way to incentivize them. They will then have a tangible financial reason to aid in the growth of the company. There different types of employee stock options: ‘incentive’, in which they only pay taxes on the stocks when they sell them; ‘non-qualified’, which requires more taxes for the employee and deductions for the employer; and ‘restricted’, which are shares that can be sold only when the company reaches certain benchmarks.

Software/hardware. If your company works with technology you can receive great discounts on computers and related software. Passing on these discounts to your employees can save them thousands of dollars on equipment. While they should be using their new gear on primarily work-related tasks, for many employees tech swag is a huge incentive for working with a particular company.

These are just three ways to incentivize your employees to do great work for your company. They involve varying degrees of financial investment on the part of the employer, but all of them showcase generosity, professionalism, and a marked faith and appreciation in the value of employees.

Transaction fees—All debit cards charge the card holder small fees when they are used on transactions. The cost of these fees depends on a combination of the financial institution that issued the card and the merchant from whom you are making the purchase. As of 2011, Visa and Mastercard were planning to significantly raise their merchant fees, from 8 cents on a $2 purchase to 23 cents, which is only a cent less than the legal limit. Other companies are expected to follow suit.

Account requirements—Another way banks are able to make a few extra bucks off their account holders is to increase the minimum balance requirements and attach corresponding feeds. CitiBank, for example, has effectively eliminated their EZ checking account option and raised their standard minimum account balance to $6,000. The fee for not maintaining that balance jumped to $15 a month, which is double the previous amount. Their mid-tier account requirements and fees also doubled. This is not an isolated case. Banks all across the company are fiddling with their account requirements in order to acquire new fees.

Debit fee—Perhaps in response to the 2010 Durbin Amendment, which famously limited the fees banks could charge merchants, Bank of America had planned a monthly $5 fee last year for debit card use. The customer backlash from the announcement was so severe that BofA cancelled the charge. Since then at least four more banks have cancelled proposed debit card fees, including JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Atlanta-based SunTrust, Regions Bank. But don’t expect them to just give up. Analysts say that in the long run, banks will bilk the money they want by instituting higher monthly bank account fees, higher ATM fees, and the elimination of debit reward programs.

Bank account fees are nothing new, nor are transaction fees. But being charged money simply to spend your own money via a debit card is a relatively new invention that deserves to be second-guessed. Account holders should also be vigilant of what kind of checking account they are enrolled in and what fees they are incurring.

Blogging—In addition to a website, your small business should also have a blog. On that blog you should post updates about your products and services, as well as anything and everything related to conveying the story and mission statement of your business. Use search engine optimization, marketing, and link building campaigns to make your blog rise higher in page rank and on search engines. Small businesses with active, optimized blogs are much more likely to find core, loyal customers and investors.

Podcasts—Podcasts are becoming extremely popular as they are a good alternative to video content and are easily distributed through Internet radio sites and RSS feeds. Having a podcast for your small business is a great way to position yourself in niche communities and it’s essentially a free form of advertising. Podcasts also reach different markets of consumers that you might not normally be connected to.

Social media—Using social media is a must for your small business. Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Foursquare, and Pinteres are just a few of the most popular and the list goes on and on and will undoubtedly grow in the 2012. While each social media platform has their advantages and disadvantages, the common thread is the ability to aggressively network with thousands of people and get them talking about your business through clever marketing, discounts, and viral content. Social media is the advertising venue of the 21st century, so not having an online presence with it in mind is tantamount to building your business underground.

The bold new century is upon us and entrepreneurs, small business owners, self-employed professionals, and freelancers all need to be sure they’re utilizing the tools that our patron saints of technology have bestowed upon us. Blogging, podcasts, and social media offer incredible varieties of options and opportunities for people to fight back against the sluggish economy.

Intuit’s GoPayment,  a credit card device for small businesses announced plans to go global.  GoPayment helps small businesses – and anyone, for that matter, who sells products or services – easily and securely process credit cards payments on the go via smartphone or tablet.

GoPayment is a rival to Square which was founded by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey. The built-in advantage that GoPayment is the community of small businesses who already use Intuit products including Quickbooks and Turbo Tax. Like Square, the GoPayment device is free.

In the traditional IRA, most taxpayers can elect to put up to $5,000 into an IRA annually ($6,000 if you’re over 50), and deduct that from their taxable income. Since this is pre-tax, it lowers your taxable income so it is an immediate tax benefit.

The Roth IRA, There is no immediate tax advantage because the contributions are made with post-tax money. The good thing is when you start withdrawing at 59 ½, you won’t be taxed at all. Another great feature of the Roth IRA is that all contributions can be withdrawn at any time with no tax or penalty.

If you not saving for retirement, start today. You can do it easily by setting up an account with Betterment.  See my earlier article about Betterment.

From the blog Consumerist, here are three recent posts that you may want to read.

It is time to pay off that credit card debt as the average credit card APR is about 15%.

If you have lower credit score and are surprised that you received a credit card offer, don’t be flattered. It is a way debt collectors can resurrect old debt.

How to lend money to family? Short answer. Carefully, and be cool with saying no. Read the long answer which includes making a contract.