February is winding down, and we now have pretty much all of the documentation that we’ll need to file our taxes. A few months ago I had resolved in my mind that this was the year we’d start using an accountant to prepare our taxes. I’ve used Turbo Tax for the past four or five [...]

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The other day I was looking up the phone number of a certain business on Google when I noticed something interesting… After searching for the business keyword and city/state, I clicked on the “Local results” link at the top. This pulls up what amounts to a phone book/map combination. Pretty standard stuff. However, just after [...]

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In case you haven’t heard, the 2006 tax year ushered in the most wide-reaching IRS refund of all time… The Telephone Excise Tax Refund. This is a one-time refund that is meant to make up for previously collected long distance phone taxes that have since been rolled back.

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This may be old news to some of you, but I was just going through a stack of unopened mail when I ran across a flyer for ING Direct’s new “Electric Orange” checking account. In short, it’s a fee-free online checking account with a current APY of 3.00% for balances under $50k. This bumps up [...]

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Here are some my favorite FiveCentNickel (subscribe) posts from one year ago this past week:
» Moissanite Instead of Diamonds
» Don’t Miss These Tax Breaks, Part 1
» Don’t Miss These Tax Breaks, Part 2
» Don’t Miss These Tax Breaks, Part 3
» On the Accuracy of CoinStar
And this is what was happening over at Raising4Boys (subscribe) over [...]

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Here’s a quick look at some of the articles that caught my eye over the past week…

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How’s this for being behind the times? Earlier this week I picked up a copy of USA Today and was greeted by a story that talked about competition amongst online banks heating up to the point that they’re now offering interest rates of 5% or more on their savings accounts. The thing is, they’ve been [...]

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This week’s Money Poll focused on the number of open bank accounts that you have, and the results are pretty interesting… There were 180 responses, and nearly 2/3 of the respondents have between two and four bank accounts. A few ’simpletons’ have just one (5%), and a smattering of banking extremists have more than ten [...]

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FiveCentNickel participated in three carnivals this week. Here they are along with links to my articles that were included in each.
The Carnival of Personal Finance included “Ten Ways to Cover Your Ass(ets).”
The Carnival of the Capitalists included “Use ‘Em or Lose ‘Em: Frequent Flyer Programs Accelarate Expirations.”
The Best of Me Symphony included “How to Protect [...]

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I just ran across this the other day in USA Today and thought it was interesting… According to the Pew Research Center, the following is a breakdown of how adult Americans pay their monthly bills:
54% write checks
28% pay electronically/online
15% pay with cash
3% other
Assuming that this is based on a truly representative sample of Americans, I’m [...]

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