I previously wrote about how we’ve gone about setting an allowance for our kids. Briefly, starting at age five they get $0.50 per year of age per week, and this (along with all other money coming in from gifts, etc.) gets divided into one of four pots — spending, short term savings, long term savings, and charity. This weekend I sat down and took the time to set up online bank accounts to hold their long term savings. Since we already bank at ING Direct ($25 account opening bonus), I simply created a subaccount for each of my kids. I then ’swept’ their long term savings from the container on the kitchen counter into their new accounts — this amounts to sticking their money in my pocket and then transferring the same amount from our main account to their subaccounts. I figured that I’d let them collect up their long terms savings a month at a time and then, on the last weekend of the month, we’ll sit down and move the money into their accounts. Despite having done this just two days ago, they’ve already asked a couple of times if they could login and look at their money. I can only imagine their excitement when they see that first interest payment!

The IRS has announced the closing of 68 of their 400 walk-in service centers nationwide. The IRS claims that visits to their help centers have declined by 19% over that past two years, while phone support has grown by 7% and traffic to the IRS website has more than doubled. This cost-cutting move has, however, been criticized for putting an unnecessary financial burden on eldery and low income taxpayers, many of whom don’t have access to online assistance, and may now have to seek professional tax prep help. So what does this mean for you? Probably the biggest thing is that there are now fewer places to go to get inaccurate information on how to file your taxes.

Well, I spent two or three hours this afternoon sorting through my e-mail inbox at work. It had somehow swollen to 678 (!) messages. I used to be in the habit of sorting out my inbox – filing, deleting, and and trimming things back down – every Friday (at worst), but I’ve recently let that slip. When combined with my apparent inability to delete even the simplest, most inane messages, it got ugly. And fast. I’m not done yet… I’ve still got about 50 messages left to handle, but it’s now back down to a manageable level. If I can find a few spare minutes this weekend, I’ll be back on top. While I was at it, I also got myself off of a few extraneous mailing lists. This won’t completely stem the tide, but it should at least slow things down just a bit.

About a week ago, I mentioned that I’m interested in learning more about real estate investing. The two sources for more information that people suggested were the writings of John T. Reed and Home Buying for Dummies. I can’t vouch for either of these, although the latter seems to focus more on purchasing a residence than an investment property. I did, however, run into a great rental property calculator over at Kiplinger.com that allows you to project income, expenses and tax benefits over five years, thereby allowing you to figure out if/when you’ll wind up in the black on any particular property. It’s based on a pretty detailed worksheet, so you need to have a fairly clear idea of your own financial situation, as well as the details of the property. But if you can pull together (or estimate) the necessary information, it’s definitely worth checking out.

If you’re anything like me, you hate having to login to gain access to news stories online. Since I sometimes link to such stories, I thought I’d post a tip for bypassing this annoyance… In case you haven’t heard, there’s a service out there called BugMeNot. This site is a repository for usernames/passwords for sites with compulsory registration — just hop over to it, look up the site you’re interested in, and you’re good to go. The problem with this is that it takes a bit of effort, and I’m kind of lazy… Enter the FireFox web browser and the BugMeNot FireFox extension. [more]

The Senate Finance Committee introduced a bill today that would make the tax exemption for 529 college savings plans permanent. The Senate bill, which has bipartisan support, mirrors one that was introduced in the House last week. The 529 exemption is currently scheduled to expire in 2010, so this is great news for anyone with young kids that are looking for an effective way to save for college. If your’re looking for more information on 529 plans, check out The Best Way to Save for College by Joseph Hurley, which is a great book on 529 plans. Also check out Joe’s website, Savingforcollege.com, which is an excellent online resource. Then again, you could always just call your rich uncle.

While perusing ProBlogger.net this morning, I ran across an interesting service offered by BlogPulse — a blogging trend tracker (direct link). After entering search terms and selecting a timeframe (from one to six months), you’ll get a graph depicting the percentage of all blog posts that mention the term(s) of interest. Beyond giving you an overall plot, you can also click on individual dates to drill down into a listing of the actual posts that mentioned the term of interest on that day. So what does this tell us about personal finance blogging? [more]

I just ran across an interesting article on CNN/Money about home appraisal fraud. Despite the fact that appraisers are supposed to come up with an independent estimate of the value of a property, they’re apparently coming under increasing pressure from lenders and realtors to hit a predetermined value (i.e., the agreed upon sales price) when appraising a property. After all, if a house appraises for less than the agreed upon sales price, the deal may not go through and nobody will earn their commission. [more]

I just ran across an interesting article on the accuracy of personal finance writers in the Akron Beacon Journal of all places — gotta love Google News! The article correctly points out that personal finance books, news stories, etc. are often riddled with factual errors that might lead you to make bad money moves. How can you protect yourself? The article has several common sense suggestions. [more]

A recent post over at AllThingsFinancial prompted me to reassess the way we handle our kids’ allowances. Thus far, we’ve been pretty lax/inconsistent about allowances, and our oldest son has recently been agitating for a more reliable stream of income. After mulling it over, we’ve settled on a new system. [more]