6 Percent on a savings account

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Through 4/30/07 HSBC is offering a 6 % rate on savings accounts. This is only for “new money”. So it will not jump up the rate on any money you currently have on deposit (arg), but if you add new money to your account, it will receive the new rate. Here is the fine print on “new money”

New Money Period is January 29, 2007 through April 30, 2007. Starting Balance means the available balance in your account as of the close of business on January 26, 2007. New Money means funds not previously held by any member of the HSBC Group deposited during the New Money Period less any withdrawals, and it excludes your Starting Balance as calculated below. New Money must be in available funds for the promotional rate to apply.

High Interest Saving Accounts

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I’ve tried two higher interest saving accounts. These rates beat any local rates I could find by a long shot. The first one was ING Direct. The whole process was very simple for this bank. Their website is very friendly and easy to navigate. Transferring money into the account was also a snap.

HSBC was the other bank I’ve tried. Their rate is slightly higher than ING Direct. The application process was quite a bit more involved and transferring money was a little bit more work, but in the end everything went quite smooth.

For overall user-friendly website, I will give the nod to ING Direct, but for interest rate, the edge goes to HSBC.

Free Personal Finance Software

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Jgnash is a nice piece of free software. It is very simple to use, not filled with over complicated features. I also like that it runs straight from a single executable file, it does not need to be installed. This also makes it a snap to just download and take for a test run. Jgnash home page. Below are some screen shots of the Jgnash software.

  • When first starting Jgnash, you are prompted to create a new file.
  • Choose your currency.
  • View the accounts list.
  • Creating a new account.
  • Viewing the bank register.
  • Create a report.

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Student Loan Payoff

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Student Loan Payoff I recently paid off my student loan debt. Felt great! I have been out of college since 1995. That is 11 years of debt that was hanging over me. Part of the problem was right after school everyone told me. “Don’t worry about student loan debt.” Not sure why everyone felt this was good advice, but I seemed to hear it over and over. So soon within a year of graduating I consolidated all my loans thus taking down a 400 month payment to around 200. And there it pretty much sat for about 9 years. Month after month….felt like the payment had always been there and would always be there. I didn’t see anyway of getting rid of so much student loan debt. In that long time, it had barely budged downward.

It was time to get serious, so for a few years I hammered away and saved up and worked anything extra I could do. It feels to great to get rid of that burden.

Going through school, I never thought more than a second about the loans I was getting. After all everyone does it right. Just sign on the line and move on. I didn’t even have any idea how much I really owed until I was all done with school.

Now that the debt is gone… (actually all my debt is gone except for my home but I’ll get into this later on), it feels great.

Using Google Spreadsheets to Help With Your Finances.

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First off, I love spreadsheets. What a great way to calculate, track, or run what if’s. Spread sheets along with many other things follow the same rule…garbage in = garbage out. I might start a spread sheet for budgeting, but I find I quickly fall behind with updating the spread sheet because maybe it’s stored on a computer I may not be working at when I need to update the data. Then by the time you can actually update the spread sheet you’ve forgotten what you were going to update. So I recently converted some of my spread sheets over to the Google online format. The import went very well with no problems. And after only a few minutes of “playing around” I found all the tools I needed to work with the data. So far I love the convenience it gives me. Wherever I am, I can jump in and update a few fields and be done.

Google Spread Sheets Now obviously Google spreadsheets has no where near the features and capabilities of Excel, but it is certainly has enough for what most people use spread sheets to do. The convenience far out weighs any missing features. I find I can actually keep my data up to date much easier which then equates to “quality in = quality out”. I could also easily share my spreadsheet with someone else if the need arose.

Give the Google spread sheets a try, after all it is free.

visit docs.google.com to sign up and try it out.

Michigan Financial Crisis

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Michigan Financial Crisis Governor Granholm (Democrat, Canada) is warning us that Michigan is in a financial crisis. I wonder who has been in charge the last few years…wait it is Mrs Granholm herself. So really she has run Michigan and it’s economy into the ground. I truly believe if Dick Devos had won, we would see a changed attitude across Michigan. I believe a big part of the economy is perception and attitude. There is no optimism, no spark for the future of Michigan.

All we can hope for is that Google is going to put a sizable office complex in Ann Arbor, in the mean time the number of jobs bleeding out is far surpassing any new jobs being created. Time for drastic measures in the way of tax cuts and incentives. Michigan is at a tipping point right now and is teetering toward falling off the edge. Something needs to happen soon.

Gathering Tax Information

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Now is the time of year that all those tax documents should be arriving in the mail. The law states that all documents be mailed out by Jan 31st. Many companies wait until that very date to mail things out. (some even later). So they should be arriving at your homes during the next few days. I usually have a manila folder or something handy and stick all tax related documents in it. Once a good week has gone past the 31st of January, I figure I’ve probably received all the documents I am going to get. That is when the real “fun” beings…

Fed Leaves Key Rate Unchanged

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Federal Open Market Committee announced today that it will keep the fed funds target rate at 5.25%.

The committee determined that, though “some inflation risks remain,” the economy is expected to grow at a “moderate pace,” and the housing market is showing “tentative signs of stabilization.”