Personal Finance Blog

The short answer to that question is not everyone. Credit card rewards programs are getting better every year, sites like www.creditcards.com are a great way to compare rewards programs between cards, which is becoming a very important part of peoples card choices. If it pays you to use a card, then why use a debit card? Debit card rewards programs are rarely ever as good as credit cards either, so it makes sense. Best of all, credit cards are a free loan… if you make a purchase, it can be 50+ days until you have to pay it back. If you’ve ever had an overdraft fee, you can appreciate that!

The rewards for having all your cash in a 4.5% APY savings account and having a good rewards program is small, I’m not going to deny it. But lets do some quick math. If you put everything on your card, earning $30,000 per year… your spending on things other than rent/loans may be around $700 per month. Now a decent rewards program will net you 1%, that’s $7 per month, or $84 per year. The APY on the savings, assuming your average balance in your account is near $1000, you’ll earn around $45 that year. That’s a total of $129 free dollars that you wouldn’t have gotten using your debit card on your no interest checking account.

The big reward here is that you’re not spending your cash, instead you’re taking out mini loans for 20-50 days at a time. Think for a second about how much overdraft fees can add up to. Two overdraft fees will add up to the same amount you earned in interest the entire year with a $1k average in your account. That’s a lot! What happens if you need to pay for something big…. in cash? Well you can keep those items on your credit card and pay a smaller payment that month if you have to.

This isn’t a bad idea for any income bracket, the more you make, the more you spend, the more rewards/interest you’ll earn. This will benefit the person who paid $400 in overdraft fees to their bank last year more, however. Just a note, if that $400 was in your savings earning 4.5% the entire year, you would have made an extra $18! Yes these are small amounts, but no one got and stayed rich by spending money with no regard for saving it.

Read the rest of this entry »

With online banking, automated phone systems, and even just ATM’s… there is zero excuse to stay in the dark about what’s coming out of your account. Obviously a nice register would work just fine, but that takes effort and it just isn’t going to happen. Honestly though, overdrafts should be a thing of the past.

So I went out and looked around for some online spending tracking, or personal finance sites, and I was surprised at what I found, having not looked around before. Working for a bank, sometimes you get tunnel vision about what is out there. These are a few personal finance tools for various things, I haven’t tried all of them yet, but I’ve read as many reviews as I can about them, and each seems to have their own little up-side.
Read the rest of this entry »

So here this is, my blog…  Welcome etc!  Feel free to read my about me for a little more info about the blog.  Basically this blog will be my own little take on personal finance.  Working for a major bank in the US has made me painfully aware of how bad my own finances really were, and how bad some people out there are letting their own get.  Right now I’m just a banker, but I plan on becoming a financial consultant down the road.  Mostly this blog will be about things that you can do to get a grip on your finances, using specific programs that some banks offer.  I’ve always been good at finding solutions, and that’s why I’m going into personal finance.  This blog will be a place to air out some of my ideas, and hopefully give people some ideas for themselves.

I’m going to try and put up links to sites I find useful of course, I’ve put a few up already so check them out and enjoy!