If you apply to as many offers as I do, you can’t afford the ink to print all those Terms and Conditions out. But it is really critical to save the details of everything you apply for, in case you need to fight for your money later. Companies change offers or take down their offer websites all the time. The solution? A free PDF Printer Driver called PDFCreator. Once installed, just do File > Print like usual but choose ‘PDFCreator’ as your printer, and out comes a nice Adobe Acrobat PDF File! The time you printed it out is even included. Also great for saving online statements.

Example: The 0% APR Discover card offer here has no mention of a balance transfer fee in the Terms and Conditions. But now, I have a .PDF of the complete T and C’s saved on my hard disk if there is any dispute.

As other bloggers have mentioned, USA Today is currently doing a six-week series on how to go on a “Financial Diet“. Nothing ground-breaking, but it’s a pretty good read with stories from real-life families and tips on how to reduce debt and save more. Last week (Week 2), the focus was How to Make (and stick to) a Budget, which is exactly what I’m trying to do right now.
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Ok, after digging a little bit more about how to manually import my transactions from VirtualBank and Presidential Bank into Quicken 2005, I find out… I can’t. Not only that, the reason is just stupid greed in my opinion. Both Microsoft Money and Quicken 2005 use the OFX format for exchanging financial data, but Money still allows you to import data using the popular .pif format. Quicken? Not only does it not allow you to import data using the .pif at all, it evens cripples your software to not accept OFX files unless your bank pays them.
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Ok, so after “reconciling” tons of transactions with Money 2005, I went ahead and purchased Quicken 2005 on the way home yesterday. I figure, the $60 is worth it in the long run if I can get my budget in order and improve on it, and I got MS Money cheap. I’m not giving up on Money just yet, I just want to find the best product for me.

First impressions? I only installed it last night, but downloading transactions for most banks has been smoother than with Money, everything balanced out right. However, some banks, like VirtualBank and Presidential Bank, don’t seem to export in Quicken’s new format. May the best personal finance software win.

This is slightly off-topic, but I’m constantly annoyed that whenever you want to simply read a news story or use their “free” service, sites often make you register and provide your name, e-mail, address, etc. I mean, it’s obvious that the only reason to do that is to (1) get demographic information for advertisers and (2) to sell your e-mail and contact info to those advertisers. Please note that MyMoneyBlog does not record or share any e-mail addresses left in the comments. In fact, an e-mail address isn’t even required to post.
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It’s really annoying when sites like The New York Times and CBS Marketwatch make you register before being allowed to enter their site and be presented with ads (and occassionally read some content).

Above are the slogans of BugMeNot.com, which stores and shares generic logins and passwords that everyone can use so you don’t have to endure any more junk mail than you already get. Check it out! Hopefully sites will get the hint and we won’t need it anymore. Also available as a Firefox extension.
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In addition to the many good books out there, you can get a pretty decent grasp of the investing world just by surfing around a bit. Many big sites have in-depth mini-universities. There is a lot of overlap and the some of the advice is pretty generic, but I still use them as resources whenever a question pops up. Here are a few:

CNN Money 101
Kiplinger.com Basics: Tutorials
SmartMoney University (My overall favorite)
MSN Money Decision Center

Wasn’t Die Hard a great movie? It’s even got a Christmas theme =). I can’t remember a single thing about the sequels though… Anyways! Diehards.org is a forum for people to discuss mutual funds, more specifically Vanguard mutual funds but not exclusively. The forum is a bit tedious to wade through, with tons of posts and little organization. However, the people there are very nice (even to newbies) and each have their own interesting spin on mutual funds and asset allocation strategies. Supposedly Mr. Bogle himself stops by occassionally. Here are some of the more interesting threads that I came across:

“The Intelligent Asset Allocator by Wm. Bernst” by 3515duck
“My Asset Allocation Plan” by Robin
“Newbie portfolio comments appreciated” by ramesh
“Single Target Retirement Fund in an IRA” by Arenal

Yippie Ky Yay…

Now that I have a rough goal to achieve of $1,500,000, I need a way to chart my progress. My favorite tool for this is Yodlee OnCenter. It is a site that aggregates all of your logins and passwords for different accounts, such as bank accounts, brokerage, 401ks, loans, and credit cards. It even keeps up with all your frequent flyer miles and various other points. It can tally up all your assets, subtract all your liablities, and show you your net worth on a daily basis. Try it out, it’s well organized, free, and I use it every day!
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