Strategies & tactics to get ahead financially & in life
Discover is a company that has been around for decades. Most people know about the Discover Card, first introduced in 1985 by Sears. At the time, it was novel because it had no annual fee and offered cardholders a higher than average credit limit. Back then, credit cards were special. Companies hadn’t realized how much […]
Quicken is one of the oldest personal finance software packages. Quicken’s origins go all the way back into the 1980s, when Scott Cook and Tom Proulx founded Intuit in Palo Alto, CA. As Intuit’s history tells it, they realized that personal computers would change the way people did personal accounting. Quicken was programmed in Microsoft […]
What if I told you there was a bank that combined the features of a high yield online savings account with the automatic savings of a micro-savings app? That’s Chime. If you were building a bank from the ground up, these are the features people care about. This review was updated November 2019. The major […]
One of the first online bank accounts I ever opened was ING Direct. ING Direct was the online bank of ING Group, founded a Dutch multinational corporation founded in 1991 (through mergers), and their high-interest rates were the talk of the financial world. Back then, the only bank that offered high-interest rates were credit unions. […]
American Express (AMEX) is best known for their credit cards but they do much much more. Credit cards are where they started, many years ago, but now they offer bank accounts too. We know they have great perks on their credit cards, but what about their bank products? Their high yield savings account is called […]
FreeTaxUSA is a tax preparation software program that is exactly what the name implies – free. At least it is for filing your federal income tax return. Like many other free tax prep services, they do charge a fee for e-filing state income tax returns. They provide the free version of the program, but you […]
We recently returned from a long vacation to England, where we were able to stay with old college friends and enjoy “living like locals.” This included driving on the opposite side on their country tiny roads! (the narrow roadways were more challenging than driving on the left, to be honest) For our trip, we purchased […]
Imagine that you can save and invest money every time you spend money. Does that sound too good to be true? It actually is true, if you use a smartphone app known as Acorns. Acorns uses a concept known as virtual spare change, that enables you to save and invest money with each purchase that […]
There are a lot of passive real estate investment options out there. Whether it’s old school real estate investment trusts (REITs) you can buy on the market or some of the many real estate crowdfunding platforms, passive investments in real estate is easier than ever. One area that hasn’t gotten as much attention in the […]
If you’ve never heard of Synchrony Bank, but seen it advertised everywhere online, you wouldn’t be alone. In fact, if you looked prior to 2014, you wouldn’t have seen Synchrony Bank anywhere. Then, in what appears to be an instant, it was everywhere. That’s because Synchrony Bank was founded in 2003 but operated as a […]