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billshrink
Billshrink.com is going to bring a never-before-seen level of transparency to consumers looking for the best credit card offer. Think of it as a turbocharged dashboard for navigating the credit card market. The site launched earlier this year as wireless plan comparison service, but with personal debt at record highs and personal savings rates at record lows, the credit card vector is potentially even more important and useful tool. I sat down with CEO Peter Pham yesterday as he showed me the actual website in action.
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Sneak Peek Of BillShrink.com's New Credit Card Comparison Tool
Billshrink.com is going to bring a never-before-seen level of transparency to consumers looking for the best credit card offer. Think of it as a turbocharged dashboard for navigating the credit card market. The site launched earlier this year as wireless plan comparison service, but with personal debt at record highs and personal savings rates at record lows, the credit card vector is potentially even more important and useful tool. I sat down with CEO Peter Pham yesterday as he showed me the actual website in action.
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4:21 PM on Wed Jun 18 2008
By Ben Popken
14,083 views,
24 comments
Latest by avniassa: I've been using [www.creditcards.com] and it's been really helpful so far. more »
hidden fees
Accurately Compare Airline Fees With Handy Charts
Finding a competitively priced airline ticket is tricky enough without each airline having its own myriad of fees and individual policies. Fortunately, the Airfarewatchdog blog lists most of the fees for the major airlines in one place. Combine it with their checked bag fee chart, and now you know all the fees. This makes meaningful comparison much easier. Otherwise, you might have to go through the entire ticket purchase process before you could figure out your total including fees. They are also "the only site that lists low airfares on all airlines, including Southwest. And [they] include special fares that you can only buy on the airline's own sites."
Those extra airline fees, compared airline by airline [Airfarewatchdog]
Checked bag fees, airline by airline [Airfarewatchdog]
how to
Search The Consumerist Directory Of Company Email Addresses And Phone Numbers
Are you trying to escalate a complaint within a company and want to see if we've posted any inside email addresses or phone numbers? Try replacing "companynamegoeshere" in the following URLs with the company you're looking for. If the company name has multiple words, remember to separate them with hyphens, i.e. washington-mutual
consumerist.com/tag/email-addresses/companynamegoeshere
consumerist.com/tag/executive-customer-service/companynamegoeshere
consumerist.com/tag/phone-numbers/companynamegoeshere
If you can't find what you want, we may not have any contact info for the company, but that's ok! Here's a few way to find a company executive's phone number, and how to figure out someone's email address.
Personal finance management site Mint.com is launching a beta for its new investment tracking system on May 6th. [Mint]
travel
Calculate The "Emissions Cost" Of Your Next Flight
Enpalo is an online calculator that lets you estimate the flight emissions of your next airplane jaunt—you choose an airline, enter your origin and destination, then sit back and light up a cigar while you laugh about how many baby polar bears you're drowning. More »
useful
Find Unclaimed Money With MissingMoney.com
If you think you might have some unclaimed money floating around somewhere, you should check out MissingMoney.com and find out. More »
real estate
Zillow Offers Anonymous Mortgage Shopping
Zillow has a new tool for those of you who wish you could do your mortgage shopping while wearing a ski mask and speaking through one of those things that makes you sound like Darth Vader — the Zillow Mortgage Marketplace. More »
Buy It Later is a cool Firefox extension that monitors specific products for you for price drops or for them to come back in stock. [BuyLater via Lifehacker]
babies
Get Info On BPA-Free Baby Products Via Text Messaging
If you've got a baby and you're concerned about buying unlabeled products that contain Bisphenol A or BPA—which some studies have indicated may lead to adverse health effects in humans—the website Z Recommends has just launched a free text messaging service that lets you query their database of companies while you're standing in the store. They've also got a printable wallet-card you can carry with you, which serves as both a cheat-sheet for the text service and a quick reference source for major companies. More »
tools
FDIC Call Center: Former Employee Says It's A Great Place For Bank & Credit Union Info
A former FDIC employee writes that the FDIC's call center (877-275-3342) is "a tremendously helpful place to get basic referral information if you're having trouble with your bank, lender, or finance company." They can't help you with complaints, but they can route you to the correct agency, provide credit union contact info, and give you the names and numbers of state agencies where your bank is located. More »
deals
Just Shop For Items With Free Shipping
Free Shipping On is a new site lets you shop only for stuff with free shipping at Amazon, eBay and tons of other sites. To use the site, just click on the Amazon or eBay tab to find free shipping from those places, or click on the Free Shipping Coupons to get free shipping coupons for the oodles of other sites. A god-send for eager-beaver online bargain hunters.
how to
One of the stumbling blocks when launching an EECB is figuring out the company email address format. There is actually a very easy way to do this. Just use wildcards in Google. What are those? We'll tell ya, inside...
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Use Wildcards In Google To Uncover Company Email Address Formats
One of the stumbling blocks when launching an EECB is figuring out the company email address format. There is actually a very easy way to do this. Just use wildcards in Google. What are those? We'll tell ya, inside...
More »
I tried out Jott this weekend and it's pretty sweet. It's a free service that lets you call a number, record a message, and then underpaid workers in India and Africa transcribe your message and email it to you, or to others. [Jott]
customer service
Complain Like A Nice Old Man
If you want to have a successful complaint, it helps to complain like Gerald. That's the father-in-the law of this WSJ writer, and he's able to perform daring feats of consumer action, like the time he got the hardware store to replace the $800 grill that stopped working a year after he bought it. Here's how he does it:
(Photo: Getty)
deals
Get Your Free GrandCentral Number
Woohoo, you can now get GrandCentral numbers again. GrandCentral is a great, free, service that lets you create a new phone number that you can have forward to other numbers. Possible uses include: making it so you only have to give out one phone number, using the phone number to mask your real phone number, setting up an internet voicemail box, recording incoming customer service calls, and saving big-time on incoming calls on your Tmobile cellphone.
tools
Find Your Attorney General Or Better Business Bureau
Bookmark this: MSNBC has a nice interactive map you can click to find your state Attorney General and/or Better Business Bureau. If a company is being really bad, it's important to file an official complaint so it's on the record. If a company gets enough complaints, it can move an AG's office to investigate. The BBB will sometimes open a hearing in the event of a dispute, and your complaint goes into a publicly searchable database, although the anecdotal evidence supplied by our readers doesn't paint a very encouraging picture of their dispute resolution process.
(Thanks to Bob!)
tools
