Baby Finances

Do you know what's crazy to me? The lack of outcry from the American consumer about lack of chip and pin cards, during this crazy crazy time of security breaches in some of America's largest retailers.  Retailers who I bet you've visited before: Target, Home Depot, PF Chang's, Sally Beauty Supply, Dairy Queen, Supervalu, UPS, Jimmy John's, Goodwill, Michael's, and Nieman Marcus - just to name a few of the ones in the last three months. What's even crazier?  There's a solution. It's the chip and pin cards that our european counterpart adopted many years ago and have become standard in the EU.  If you've been anywhere in western Europe in the last 5 years, you know how difficult it can be (especially outside of large cities) to make purchases with a standard US credit card that doesn't use chip and pin technology. Why don't we get them? Because it's more expensive for the retailers & banks to put this additional technolog...

The whole house buying thing has been stressful, so I've been trying to find ways to work that stress off through exercise. Plus, the cruise to Bermuda was not nice on my waistline.  Earlier this week there was a Groupon for a local Bikram Yoga studio.  I've done hot Vinyasa / Flow yoga in the past and I loved it, so I decided to try the Bikram style.  It was a lot harder than I remember hot yoga being.  Mostly I think because I'm not as fit, and I'm fatter than I used to be.  There was less flow between the poses, which was both good and bad, but I think the poses were of equal difficulty and the heat & humidity were similar to Vinyasa. I may have puked up all the water I drank during class in the locker room afterward.  Gross.  Next class I'm definitely going to be better about hydration before class.  I'm going to stick with yoga for 20 classes.  I have 19 more to go before the end of August, which means about 2X a week max, and if...

We're almost to closing on the house we're buying.  We got the final mortgage commitment and appraisal. We've only got a few details to wrap up before the closing, including title insurance.  Doing some research on title insurance, as well as the ownership history of the property (www.masslandrecords.com), I'm thinking it might be a good idea.  I had no idea how much information about land ownership, mortgages, liens and everything was available online.  You can totally stalk people using this (I maybe, maybe not have tried looking things up... )  But it was useful to find out how complex the ownership history has been on our home for the past 25-30 years of scanned records in the database.  Given the ownership history over the last 83 years, I think we'll be getting title insurance to cover us. We also learned more than I think I wanted to know about our sellers finances.  My husband bought me a glass carboy for Christmas, and I used it for a second...

There's a CreditKarma.com competitor - Quizzle.com. I signed up for it today. It does provide you with your Esperian score, plus it provides all the other information on your credit report - accounts, balances, etc. Plus it provides a rating for how much savings and debt that you have vs. your income. It's actually pretty sweet. It would also tell you how much your score might be effected by getting a new credit card, or maxing out a credit card or something. I think it provided more useful information and more functionality than CreditKarma. Overall - I think I prefer Quizzle to CreditKarma. Like CreditKarma, Quizzle can also track your score over time. The catch is, you have to log in periodically - so now I have my history in CreditKarma, and I want to use Quizzle. So screwed.

Anyone Beta Testing Simple.com? I don't know enough about their business model yet. It sounds like a very customer focused banking solution - basically the entire front end of the bank that you want. But it appears like they farm out the back end. I'm concerned about their business model and where they are making their money. They clearly aren't striving for a bait and switch, but I fear that if another company buys them out - that's ultimately what it will become. Anyone know how they are making money? I'd like for them to make money off something legit - so it won't ultimately turn into an unintentional bait & switch. If they aren't making money as an organization - they won't survive. They're a business and therefore needs to turn a profit. Are they making interest off the back end? Borrowing for super cheap rates in order to source out the front end? Then don't offer their customers interest? (This is a fine biz model.) Anyone! ...

Dear Mint, Why are you trying to merge my Budget Tab & My Overview Tab? If I need to know how much I've spent out of my budget - I'll see that already on the overview tab when I first login. Why are you making it so hard for me to figure out how much I budgeted for each category for the month? Why do I now have to roll-over the budget to see how much I'm allowing for that category? FREAKING ANNOYING. I go to the budget tab to set up my budget - not to see how much I have left. Just because you can do cool things with rollovers. Please don't add things just so that you can say you did something this year on your yearly review. Please only add things that add value to the user. If you want to add how much I've spent already in that budget - at least do a $25/$100 or something along that lines - not just what is left - so it's a huge pain for me if I'm adjusting my budget to see how much more I need to add if a new expense comes up. It only makes ...