FiLife

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

Starting next fall, Harvard announced on Monday, families earning between $120,000 and $180,000 won’t have to pay more than 10% of their annual income towards tuition. The school will also eliminate loans from its award packages and take the equity that a family has in its home out of the financial-aid equation.

Harvard isn’t the first school to eliminate loans from financial-aid packages. But none have reached out to the middle and upper-middle class the way Harvard did this week, let alone with a policy that’s so easy to understand.

Now that Harvard has taken the lead among other schools in terms of financial-aid offerings, we decided to call some Harvard competitors that have introduced improved aid programs themselves in recent years and see if they planned to match Harvard’s move.

Here’s what the spokespeople for the schools said: (more…)

Money earning more money – it’s a wonderful thing.

As regular FiLife readers may know, my husband and I are looking to buy our first apartment. Our down payment resides in a Citibank e-Savings account, which currently yields 4.0%. We’ve saved a respectable sum, and I get a sense of satisfaction watching it grow without having to do anything at all.

But the last time I checked the balance - and I do this often - I started thinking: Can I do better?

So I came up with an idea. If I was a bank product manager for a day, I’d create something tailor-made for first-time homebuyers: an account specifically earmarked for down payment savings that offers one percentage point more in interest than the highest-yielding online savings account already in the market. (more…)

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…)

It’s a scene that I’ve witnessed all too many times.

Last week, I strolled up to my Washington Mutual ATM only to find a stranger’s forgotten Citibank card already in the machine. I quickly grabbed the card before the thieves could and handed it in to the customer service desk. The WaMu employee thanked me and rolled his eyes – a face of frustration, as if this happens all the time.

The absent-minded Citi customer was probably used to the “dip reader” ATMs (for a visual, click here). At Citi locations, for instance, you insert your card, wait for the machine to recognize it and then remove the card before you tell the machine what you want to do. The card never disappears into the machine.

In contrast, the “manual card reader,” (for a visual, click here) like the one at WaMu branches, takes your card, sucks it all the way into the machine and doesn’t let go until after you’ve received your cash and told the machine that you’re done.

So why don’t all banks use the dip reader ATMs? (more…)

There goes another rate cut I won’t get for a few months.

Just recently, I learned that Wednesday’s one-quarter percentage point reduction in the Federal Funds Target Rate doesn’t affect the variable interest rate I pay on my private student loan until January. How can that be, given that online savings account rates are sure to fall within days?

It took a while to figure out the answer.

(more…)

Last week, I questioned why more credit-cards don’t do a better job of categorizing monthly spending. And I promised to do a little digging to figure out who offers what.

In an ideal world, my credit card would provide a monthly pie chart to help me keep tabs on where the bulk of my money goes. If that can be linked into my online bank account, even better. These seem like reasonable requests, but most banks and card-issuers only offer bland year-end summaries. Or, they’ve focused their energies on services that sound cutting-edge in theory – like receiving text messages when your balance is due – but that don’t really help us manage our money. Others, like Bank of America, are on the right track.

Here’s what I found: (more…)

Sure, happy to.

Here’s the big idea: There’s so much about the world of personal finance that ought to be different: cheaper, easier, more personalized. So why don’t the companies that make things expensive and slow and generic just make them better already? We figured we’d actually ask them.

See the “Why Don’t They…” link over there to the left? That’s where you’ll find the questions we’ve posed so far. Please check the answers out and let us know what you think. If you have burning questions of your own, drop them in the comments field or send us an email. If we can’t answer them ourselves, we’ll post and figure them out.

– Ron Lieber

Living on a budget takes the spontaneity out of living. If my husband and I discover an adorable little restaurant while we’re walking through Brooklyn, we never think about whether we’ve budgeted for it. We just go.

But there comes a time in life when you need to take a hard look at what you’re spending, largely because you’ve set some goals. For us, that time is now.

In our household, we charge most of our expenses to a credit card and pay off the bill, in full, each month. That way, we earn more points and get a general idea of where the money disappears to. But you know what would be even better? Knowing precisely what percentage of my money went to food, shoes and other frivolities. And you know who would be really good at doing this? My credit-card company (that means you, Citibank), because it would require no effort on my part. (more…)

So I’m switching my checking account over to Schwab, and my ATM cards turned up in the mail recently. Like most banks these days, Schwab’s ATM cards are also debit cards, which means they work both in ATM machines and anywhere Visa is accepted (some banks work with MasterCard instead).

I’ve never had a debit card, and I don’t want one now. They make little sense for people like me who only use credit cards to buy things.

Here’s how I came to this conclusion:

(more…)