Lovely idea for a service. You give it access to your online credit card statement, it “rounds up” every transaction to the nearest dollar, and donates the difference to charity on a monthly basis. Currently works seamlessly with American Express cards.
Just imagine…
Reading the 'about’ page of banksimple, the new online bank that Alex Payne has left Twitter to work on, I felt sad.
A simpler bank that is easy to use.
A bank that treats you with respect.
No extraneous features.
No hidden fees.
I already have that. I feel sorry for the people who don’t.
Well, not I don’t have that in a bank per se, but Digital Federal Credit Union — the credit union I conduct all my personal banking with — charges me practically nothing for my checking or savings accounts, refunds the fees other banks charge me to use their ATMs, has a credit card with a fantastically low APR, and has never been anything less than ace to me when I’ve needed to speak to a human.
Despite my being thousands of miles away from the nearest branch, they’re still more convenient than the banks that litter the streets of SF, not least since they support scanning paper checks and uploading them on my home laptop (and now, with a new iPhone app, I can just use my iPhone camera!)
Seriously folks, if your bank is a bunch of dicks, look around for a local credit union. They’re not all as awesome as DCU, I’m sure, but it’s well worth it.
[Utterly random geekyawesome history aside: DCU is so-named because the company whose employees they originally serviced? DEC!]
Ben Goldacre on the experiments that show that humans are happier with things that cost them more money. I suggest naming this “the Bose effect”.
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money
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SCIENCE!
Man opens thousands of checking accounts, then links them to E*Trade, who verify each by sending sub-dollar deposits. The richard-pryor-in-superman-3 attack in action.
Mechanical Turk project where users were paid $0.01 to draw a section of the $100 bill.
The new UK coinage is wicked cool — the individual coins are part of a larger picture.
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coins
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design
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money
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uk
Wesabe have created an open API to allow folks to hack on their bank account data. I foresee some stonking visualization work coming out of this that will put Quicken, Microsoft Money, etc to shame.
I knew of the security feature that prevents scanning/photocopying modern paper currency, but I hadn’t heard this name for it.
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forgery
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money
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security
Good tips on avoiding being caught out by unexpected “fees”.
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CONSUME!
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money
Retirement Funds over Time
I was working on retirement-planning stuff this evening: checking my 401(k) investments, finally setting up a Roth IRA for myself, that sort of thing.
I plotted this graph in Microsoft Money showing Joy's and my retirement funds since I started working. The numbers are wiped out in the name of modesty, but the way the graph's trending? Makes me happy.
(The different colours are different investment accounts. See if you can spot the three year period where I was working for startups which didn't offer retirement benefits.)
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graph
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money
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retirement
Marc Hedlund’s start-up launches. Looks like an awesome light-weight social web-based finance manager, for folks for whom Quicken is too much hassle. Whether users will entrust their financial info to Web 2.0 remains to be seen.
“Tracking how much money people can lose with penny stocks from spam.” Next you’ll be telling me that V!A6RA doesn’t work!
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bizarre
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money
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spam
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stocks
Us east-coasters can now get our full credit reports online for free.
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credit
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money
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usa
I'm