FiLife

That headline might be Onion-worthy, but according to the Dallas Morning News (via Digg), it’s true.

According to police, Charles Ray Fuller, 21, was arrested on forgery charges for trying to cash a check for $360 billion. Fuller walked into a Chase branch with the check and when the bank called the issuer, she claimed that she didn’t write it, nor did his name appear on the check in the first place. Chase, you may have saved her an overdraft fee! Booya!

Fuller claims that the check came from his girlfriend’s mother to start a record business. And for those of you counting at home, $360 billion could buy you 36 billion copies of Cyndi Lauper’s single “Money Changes Everything” on vinyl. Now there’s a business plan.

-Mary Pilon

PS - Did you know that your computer keyboard is “dirtier than a toilet”?

Illustration Credit

Here at FiLife, we love credit reports. We love them so much, that we want free credit monitoring.

Well, it would also be nice to have a butler, a private island or a pony. But free credit monitoring seems totally doable.

First of all, your credit report is your life in credit, on paper. It can be ordered once a year, for free, from each of the three credit reporting agencies (Equifax, Experian and TransUnion). Checking it regularly helps ensure that your record stays clean of identity theft, because as we learned last week, no one is safe. Not only that, but the majority of credit reports have some kind of error, so getting that noise fixed will help you down the road when applying for that yacht loan.

Monitoring your credit report through FairIsaac costs $89.95 a year (that’s roughly 359 dumplings). That seems like a lot of money considering it’s our information. Conceptually, we have a hard time dealing with that one. And according to a recent survey from Synergistics Research, six in every ten people surveyed said that free credit monitoring from their bank would be valuable, while close to a third said it would be very valuable. The survey also found that four in ten people surveyed would be willing to open up a special checking account to receive free credit monitoring; one in six would be very likely to do so. The people want it!

Memo to banks: free checking accounts are common now in the banking world. Free checking is bomb, but it’s not enough any more, especially as fear of having our information breach continues to rise. Here’s a a new chance to lure eager, finance-info-hungry consumers into your banking nests and keep them coming back for more.

And in the meantime, we’ll keep saving up for the other things on our want list.

-Mary Pilon

Illustration credit

For the past four years, I’ve led a double life.

I have a checking account at Washington Mutual in New York and another I left behind at a credit union in Lane County, Oregon. The Oregon account, a frequent hot spot for my coin collections when I was little has not only collected dust, but has started charging me monthly fees. An error on their part, since they thought I had already graduated and rolled my student checking account into a regular, fee-bearing one. Whatever—it was time to take the cash, sever ties and break-up.

But this caused me to question my other banking relationship. Was WaMu going to pound me with fees come this May when I graduate? Which banks try to steal some extra clams from recent alumni while they’re busy jugging student loans, credit debts, leaving their campuses and having their quarterlife crises?

Most of this stuff was in the fine print of the agreements students sign as precocious freshmen. Below is a list of major banks and what they’ll do to their student customers once they graduate. If your bank isn’t on there, call them to head off any potential ickiness come cap-and-gown day.
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Two months ago, I was annoyed to discover that the rule makers behind Charles Schwab’s High-Yield Investor Checking account wouldn’t give me an ATM card that had the debit-card portion of it shut off (in other words, a card that only worked as an old-fashioned ATM card). My only option was to keep the Visa debit card that showed up with the welcome package for my new Schwab checking account.

(I explained why I wanted this option in the first Why Don’t They post on this topic here.)

At the time, A Schwab spokesman told me that what I was asking for was not a standard product across the banking industry. That didn’t seem right to me, so we looked into it. (more…)

Ok, for those of you tuning in to the middle of our programming, here’s the briefest of recaps:

• I bank at Citibank
• Like most of you that use the bank on the corner, I get hit with all sorts of fees.
• I hate Citibank.
• I want a checking account that reimburses me for all ATM fees, has no fees or minimums of its own, has a good online setup and pays me a stupid amount of interest for storing my money there.
• Until recently, I thought that none of this was possible.
• I was wrong.
• Turns out most, if not all, of the best banking deals can be found at online banks.
• After some initial research, I thought that Charles Schwab had the best deal going.

So that should bring us up to speed. Since my last post, I’ve had a course correction. I was all set to sign up with Charles Schwab (had the application filled out and everything), but then a little birdy whispered “Fidelity” in my ear, so I went to check out what that mutual-fund and brokerage company was offering.

Turns out they were offering almost the exact same thing. Except the interest rate on their checking account was 3.5%. Schwab’s is 4%. Game over, you would think.

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Earlier this week, Ezra Mound, FiLife’s systems administrator and resident security expert, sent a few questions to Mint founder Aaron Patzer about how Mint keeps user data safe (click here and scroll down to see our series of posts on Mint’s tool).

Here are Ezra’s (abbreviated) questions with Aaron’s (unabbreviated) answers: (more…)

Debit and Credit-Card Purchases Per Month: About 50
The Percentage Mint Tagged Incorrectly or Incompletely: 30%
Shopping for Better Deals Right Now? Just finished, actually (due to the good influence of my FiLife colleagues)

I’m a nut for tools that make me feel like I have my act together. As a senior in college tracking my spending carefully, I try to use my credit and debit cards for everything I can. But I do hit up the local ATM a fair amount. When I heard about Mint, I was skeptical. (Click here for our first post on Mint, which describes it a bit more).

Is this site really going to save my pockets from financial demons? (more…)

Debit and Credit-Card Purchases Per Month: About 90
The Percentage Mint Tagged Incorrectly or Incompletely: 59%
Shopping For Better Deals Right Now? Yes

Mint would be great if it worked. I’m not being snide here. I was totally wowed when they came to our offices and demoed the site, but my experience was a bit different.

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Debit and Credit-Card Purchases Per Month: About 50
The Percentage Mint Tagged Incorrectly or Incompletely: 34%
Shopping For Better Deals Right Now? Always open to possibilities

Unlike Irina, my husband and I charge pretty much everything we can (and pay it off in full each month).

It’s worth noting, however, that if you aren’t set up for online access to your credit or debit-card accounts, you’ll need to do that with all of the card companies before starting in with Mint. That’s because Mint needs your usernames and passwords to access your account. Handing these over made me nervous – another FiLifer will be addressing Mint’s security in detail in a day or two.

Setting up online access to a handful of our accounts took about 15 minutes. What followed, however, really tested my patience. (more…)

Debit and Credit-Card Purchases Per Month: About 20
The Percentage Mint Tagged Incorrectly or Incompletely: 35%
Shopping For Better Deals Right Now? No

The most enticing thing for me about Mint was the promise that it could tell me how much I spend on what. (See yesterday’s post for more on what Mint’s tool tries to do). Sounds simple, but I’ve never had the discipline to track my spending.

For example, I would love to see how the amount I spend on clothes stacks up against the amount I spend on food each month—these being my two largest expenses aside from rent. Perhaps I am looking to be shamed into cutting back on some of these things.

Impatient for the masochism to begin, I loaded in my debit and credit cards (it really does take seconds, as Mint promises), clicked on the Spending Trends tab and alas, shamed I was not. (more…)