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Wall Street Fighter has a list of 18 money management websites, to handle everything from making zero-commission stock trades to dunning your family for past-due IOUs. [Wall Street Fighter]
tools
5-50% Off At Home Depot
By 9.18.08
Looking to spruce up the ol’ nest? Home Depot announced a big sale today, with temporary pricecuts of 5-50%, with 400 items being announced each Thursday for the next three weeks.
BillShrink Launches Free Credit Card Comparison Service
By 9.18.08
BillShrink’s free credit card comparison service launches today, and you should check it out to see whether your current credit card is the best available option for you. The great thing about BillShrink is it doesn’t try to get you to sign up for a particular card—it simply aggregates the information on each one, then helps you quickly navigate your options to find the best choice for your specific needs. (The site makes money when you sign up for a new service.)
'Rudder' Provides Your Daily Financial Status Via Email
By 9.12.08
Rudder is a new personal finance service that differs from the dozens of other ones now available in two key ways: it presents a simplified overview of your available funds, which it calls “What’s Left,” and it delivers it (along with bill reminders and balance notifications) to your email inbox instead of requiring you to visit a website. Think of it as a highly customized “Very Short List” or “Daily Candy,” only the topic is always your current financial health.
Readers' Favorite 3rd Party Online Wishlists
By 9.11.08
A number of readers chimed in on the Best Buy-branded wishlist browser add-on post with the alternatives they prefer instead. They were: 1) Amazon’s Universal Wishlist, 2) Del.icio.us, 3) Wishlist.com, 4) Wishlistr.com. Got any others? As far as what most Consumerist’s thought of the Best Buy add-on, commenter dragonfire81 probably captured it best…
Save For Specific Goals With SmartyPig.com
By 9.10.08
“Saving up.” It’s nearly an alien concept in this “buy with debt” world, but into that breach steps SmartyPig. The site lets you set and save for specific goals in their online savings accounts at a competitive 3.9% APY savings rate. There’s all sorts of built-in graphs and widgets to track your progress, but then you can make it social, if you like, by making a page where your goals public and having friends and family or other random people on the net (export to Facebook, etc) track and root for your progress, or even contribute to your goal.
FSA Ombudsman Solves Your Federal Student Aid Crises
By 9.10.08
Got a problem with your federal student loan? The Federal Student Aid Ombudsman specialists are here to help. First they’ve got a bunch of tips for you to fix your problem on your own. If all those don’t work, contact them by phone, fax, or mail and they will help you out. For reals. This is reader Trey’s great experience with them:
Quickly Get A Live Rep With Dial-A-Human
By 8.26.08
Dial-A-Human.com is just like Gethuman.com, offering a cheat sheet of secret codes to bypass annoying phone-trees and get right to a live operator.
Find Out What People Paid For Their Cars
By 8.25.08
OpenCarPrice.com is a site dedicated to bringing you previously secret information, the actual price people are paying for their cars. Just select the make and model and the site spits out the info. The database gets filled by reader-submitted reports. There’s no guarantee that everything is 100% accurate, but it can at least give you a better picture of what you you can reasonably expect to pay…and negotiate for. Another site that does this RealCarTips.
Demystify Car Repair Prices With RepairPal.com
By 8.4.08
Now you never have to wonder if the mechanic is scamming you on repairs. RepairPal.com lets you punch in your make, model, year zip, and repair and then they’ll tell you the normal range of prices for it are. A graph shows the range of costs, broken down to whether you are going to an independent shop or a dealer. The source data, which the site has never been publicly available before now, goes back to 1990. A good resource for getting general numbers for what you can expect to pay for basic auto repairs.
Fonolo.com Slash And Burns Dread Phone Trees
By 7.31.08
Fonolo.com promises to be an industrial-powered buzzsaw for hacking down phone trees. They’ve spidered companies’ entire customer service phone trees and you just click on a chart online where you want to go. Fonolo calls the company for you, navigates to that point, and calls you on your phone when the call is ready. Boom, you’re transferred right in without waiting or wanting to kill yourself. It’s also free. Good news for Vincent Ferrari wannabes, a forthcoming feature will let you record calls and publish them online at the click of a button. Currently in closed beta, you can enter your email address on their front page and they’ll let you know when it’s ready. Screenshots inside…
Mint Adds Loans, Mortgages, CC APR Changes
By 7.29.08
Popular personal-finance management site has added some cool new features. You can now add your student and auto loans, monitoring balances and getting reminders when it’s payment time. Over 1000 lenders were added. Mortgages are now supported, letting you set auto-reminders for when payments are due. The site also now tracks your credit card interest rate, sounding the klaxons when your rate goes up. This gives you a chance to negotiate a better rate (here’s a sample script) or port your balance to a lower-rate card (here’s how). More banks and other features have been added, with investment and home value support on the way, bringing it closer to the promise of being your free one-stop total web-based personal finance dashboard.
Email Addresses For 17 Bank Of America Executives
By 7.7.08
Here are 18 working Bank of America executive/employee email addresses. A Consumerist reader launched a EECB (executive email carpet bomb) that got his overdraft fees refunded; these were the ones that didn’t bounce back, plus some more we found recently.
Sneak Peek Of BillShrink.com's New Credit Card Comparison Tool
By 6.18.08
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.
Accurately Compare Airline Fees With Handy Charts
By 6.4.08
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.”
Search The Consumerist Directory Of Company Email Addresses And Phone Numbers
By 5.30.08
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
By 5.2.08
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Personal finance management site Mint.com is launching a beta for its new investment tracking system on May 6th. [Mint]
Calculate The "Emissions Cost" Of Your Next Flight
By 4.25.08
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.
