Author: guru

MegaMillions Irresponsible And Bizarre Promotion

Mega Millions tickets

It shouldn’t come to our readers that lottery tickets are not a good investment and are certainly not a retirement planning tool. But we were surprised to see “Save For Retirement” prominently featured at megamillions.com presumably as something MegaMillions might allow one to do.

This is an irresponsible and dangerous message. We understand that people enjoy buying lottery tickets for the chance it gives them to dream of a major change in their lives. However, lottery tickets are not a retirement saving tool.  We call upon MegaMillions and the states behind it to immediately cease this misleading promotion and stick to promoting the lottery in a responsible way.

Manilla Organizes Your Bills and Subscriptions in One Place

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We recommended Mint.com as a good option for keeping track of your finances. Mint recently rolled out Bill Reminders. But this doesn’t compare to beta service Manilla.

Manilla, owned by the Hearst Corporation, consolidates your financial statements into one account. It will send email/text reminders to remind you when bills are due, allow you to view full statements through the site.

The company hopes to offer a less expensive alternative to paper bills. U.S. businesses send 48 billion account notices statements and bills each year, and this can cost up to 75 cents per bill, which adds up. It’s closest competitor, Intuit(the same company that owns Mint)’s Paytrust, charges $9.95 a month for its service.

For us, Manilla has the potential to fill in where Mint is missing. Mint shows transactions. It does not organize bills and statements. You may wish to review a statement months later, for whatever reason. This saves you from organizing these documents yourself.

The company recently came out with an Android and iOS app, which is how we heard about it initially. It seems very promising. If you need a system for notifying you of pending bills, try this out…

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Be One of The People Paying their Credit Card Bills On Time

Credit cards Français : Cartes de crédit Itali...

Late Credit Card Payments are the lowest they’ve been in seventeen years. This is despite an increase in the use of credit cards. People are cutting back on the number of cards they carry and accumulating less debt in general.

Credit cards are great…if you pay them off. It is often too easy to lose track of how many money you have because you can spend much more with a credit card. As long as you pay off the bill by the due date, a credit card is essentially a short-term loan. The downsides only come when you can’t pay.

There are also benefits that come with credit card purchase that users may or may not take advantage of. Fraud protection is the most often appreciated benefit of credit cards. The credit card company is assuming the fraud risk.

But people forget that credit cards also offer extended warranty services. Of course, the risk of these is that you need to retain your receipts and your manufacturers warranty, or your claim may be denied. They offer options like car rental loss, purchase protection, travel accident/trip cancellation insurance, emergency assistance, and more.

While limited yourself to one credit card is a potentially frugal move, having two allows you to have something to handle your business should an account unexpectedly be frozen, for whatever reason.

In this modern computerized world, paying off your credit card on time is easy. The credit card company will let you automate the payments. you can tell it to pay the full amount on or around the due date. You’ll never worry about missing a payment again. And instead of going through and reviewing the bill, then setting up a payment…you can assume the payment should be made, and your review is to only override what you would, in a normal month, ultimately do…pay your bill.

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Start with Mint

Image representing Mint.com as depicted in Cru...

We have several different personalities who will be contributing to Dealy Planet, but I wanted to start out talking about my recent attempts to get my own finances organized. Like many, I procrastinated.about this, telling myself I’d get organized when I had some money.

Then I realized one simple truth. If I didn’t get organized, I’d never have any money. You can’t instinctively keep track of your finances. Well, maybe YOU can…but I can’t. So, as the title says…Start With Mint.

Mint is a web-based personal finance management service available in the United States and Canada, and is a subsidiary of Intuit, best known for Quicken products. Intuit acquired Mint in 2009. The site has over five million users.  Mint is free, earning commissions on financial products it recommends, and is committed to remaining free.

Signing up for Mint is easy. Then, you can provide it with account information for your various financial institutions and it will pull all of this information into a single interface. The service is designed to be read-only, and thus it cannot move funds, and is highly encrypted for security, so it is at least as safe as your bank’s website.

It imports your transactions and automatically categorizes them. This is not perfect, but you can set up rules to automatically make tweaks, and you may also manually adjust transactions. For example, I manually change my Amazon transactions to separate them into various categories, such as Electronics, Books, etc. I want to know how much I am spending on each of these things.

It also helps by offering alerts that supplement my bank alerts. Some of my creditors don’t bother to send me alerts. I actually recently abandoned a bank that didn’t send me a single alert for three years, even to tell me my statement was ready. I’d rather have too many alerts than too few. And I can adjust those.

Once you have all this, you can start setting up Budgets to try and keep better control of your money. Mint also offers Goals, a newer feature I haven’t taken much advantage of, but have played with. I suppose all my goals are in place.

There are some complaints about Mint. Many of them are par for the course for any company, and some claim they have slowed down their innovation since Intuit acquired them. However, they did just recently add in a feature many people had been demanding. Cash and Check Tracking. You can enter your cash spending when you return to your computer, and even deduct it from your last ATM withdrawal. Support for entering it on the go is available on iPhone and pending on Android You can also track Pending Transactions, which Mint will try to reconcile when the charges actually post.

Mint is also beta-testing a formal bill tracking feature that allows users to track multiple bills in one location and set up reminders. Mint already offers this for credit card bills, but this adds support for other types of bills. None of these are wildly new ideas, but putting all of these things together creates one powerful package.

So, open up a Mint account. Hopefully it works for you, as some people have had trouble linking it to some financial institutions. But if it works, it is the best tool out there for what it does. We tried to find an alternative, but so far…nothing offers what Mint does.

 

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Why You Want to be Frugal and Not Cheap

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People use the term cheap as a derogatory term, and they often use the terms frugal and cheap as if they were synonyms.

A frugal person is restrained in their acquisition of goods and services. They are not afraid to spend money when necessary, but they do so responsibly, and restrain their impulse buying. You want to be frugal.

You do not want to be cheap, although if you are, you can certainly benefit from our thoughts as well. A cheap person avoids spending money at all costs, and does not consider the value of an item, only its monetary cost. They look around for the least expensive item, not the best deal. The best deal on an item may not be the cheapest.

We advocate the middle road. Don’t buy the cheapest item you can find, unless that is what satisfies your needs. Look for something in the middle of the spectrum, then get that item for the cheapest you can find it. Cut rate items often, but not always, are less reliable. If you buy all your items at the local dollar store, don’t be surprised if the quality and longevity of these items require you to replace them more often than a more expensive purchase.

So, welcome to Dealy Planet, where we will keep you up to date on how to keep your personal finance in order, where and how to find the best deals, and more!