How will Hello Wallet benefit me? Is it worth the cost?
CreditKarma review I don't personally use HelloWallet, but I have also heard very good things about it. Independence from financial products is a HUGE thing in the field because so many investment advisers place the firm before the customer (c.f. Too Big To Fail), so having an independent resource is a huge benefit.
Overall I think it sounds like it's worth it. It's hard to find that high of a rate on a checking account these days.  It looks like you're looking at this bank, and I can see they have a few more requirements that seem a little tedious: If you don't do these things every month, then you lose the great interest rate. If you can think of an easy way to jump through these hoops and not forget, then it's probably worth it. For example, if you routinely eat out for lunch or buy a morning coffee, you can use that card to pay for it. Set yourself a recurring reminder in your calendar or smartphone to remind you to login to the online banking site. Ultimately, since this is an emergency fund, it's a good idea to keep it nice and liquid in a checking account. You're not likely going to find many other options that will give you a better (and safe) return and still keep your funds available for when you need them. In summary, it sounds like a good idea to me so long as you think you can reliably jump through their hoops. What's wrong with WIX? I've heard some good and bad about it. I signed up for it because it's cheap concerning how I didn't know how well this would even do at all. I was going to move to Shopify if I got bigger and had more funds to start.  For the last response, how would I research how competitive the market is for organic search? Again, I'm such a noob and am starting from little knowledge, please bear with me here. Haha. I switched from Quicken for Mac to Moneydance, and have not regretted it.   I see only one weakness in MD compared with Quicken: its reporting is not very good.  Your information is all there and well organized, but sometimes it's hard work to extract it in a convenient form. Of course a lot depends on what you need from the application, but I strongly recommend you take a look at MD before deciding. Here are some pros and cons.  Note the list is not comprehensive, but should be a good start. Pros: Alternative to Fiat Money supply - it is an international currency and can be thought of as a protection against having your money in dollars or pounds for example.  Some people think that it will eventually replace fiat money supply.  This is unlikely to happen any time soon. Move money anywhere - Anyone who has an internet connection can download a wallet and receive bitcoins. Route into Altcoin market - A lot of money is being made in alternative cyrptocurrencies such as etherium, often the best way to buy these is with Bitcoin. Potential massive gains - Bitcoin has gone from 1 dollar 7 years ago to over 2000 dollars, some think it may go even much higher in the future. Fixed money supply - Fixed cap of bitcoins, there will never be more than a fixed amount (unless code changes) which is one reason why it has gained so much value. Secrecy - Some cryptocurrencies are anonymous - which means you can hide your wealth and move it about. Negatives: Storage of bitcoins - If you hold your wallet on your computer and lose it without a backup, you have lost everything.  If you hold it on an online exchange and they go down/something bad happens you could lose it.   Regulation is in its infancy.   There is also a pro here - if you have access to your wallet then no one can freeze your account like a bank potentially could. Tax/Legal implications - Legislation against bitcoins could occur and can cause issues for users.  Tax implications can be confusing and an issue. Massive swings - price can go up massively and also down massively - it is not currently a stable investment. Negative ties - Some people associate bitcoin with money laundering and buying drugs - slightly unfairly as it is nothing you can't do with cash (and cash doesn't have a permanent record of your transaction) - but it does have this negative connotation. Summary. Could be worth investing in bitcoin, could potentially make good gains.  Could also lose everything or get in trouble with authorities if they suspect you of financial crime.  I wouldn't invest anything you couldn't afford to lose and I would be mindful of the risks. Thanks for the info! It seems the consolidation option is the best; switching to the new merchant services provider and getting the discount from our POS on gift card software  Can you give me a but more info about the customer loyalty/marketing info? "Some features to be aware of are: How you prioritize these features will depend on your specific circumstances.  For instance, if your credit score is poor, you may have to choose among cards you can get with that score, and not have much choice on other dimensions.  If you frequently travel abroad, a low or zero foreign transaction fee may be important; if you never do, it probably doesn't matter.  If you always pay the balance in full, interest rate is less important than it is if you carry a balance.  If you frequently travel by air, an airline card may be useful to you; if you don't, you may prefer some other kind of rewards, or cash back. Cards differ along numerous dimensions, especially in the ""extra benefits"" area, which is often the most difficult area to assess, because in many cases you can't get a full description of these extra benefits until after you get the card.  A lot of the choice depends on your personal preferences (e.g., whether you want airline miles, rewards points of some sort, or cash back).  Lower fees and interest rates are always better, but it's up to you to decide if a higher fee of some sort outweighs the accompanying benefits (e.g., a better rewards rate).  A useful site for finding good offers is NerdWallet." I don't follow Bitcoin but that seems like a really good service to offer to businesses. It protects their money and it nets out a commission (presumably) on each transaction. Plus, it helps create more acceptance of Bitcoin as a currency which leads to more transactions. Brilliant really. Look up You Need A Budget...the methodology is really the key and the software is elegant and practical.  It's not about tracking spending, it's about planning what your dollars are going to do.  The application automates much of the budget planning and data entry as it remembers your input (and is totally customizable).  If you follow their basic blueprint, you can spend just minutes a week.  They offer free online classes too (love this).  I do not have skin in their game but have been a fan since it was just a spreadsheet. And yes, they have a mobile app, which means you can enter transactions on the go with just a few taps and then have your data synced across the cloud or just across your network. It would be difficult to answer without knowing specifics about a particular offer. In certain cases, it's definitely great and one could become a millionaire [Google for example]. In other cases one could lose money. In most cases one makes a decent return. As the specifics are not available, in general look out for: Most of these would determine if the plan is good for you to get into. Can confirm that. I only eat at places that accept it, no matter where I go. I know at least 20+ friends who do the same.  Consumers love it for the rewards and purchase protection. Their customer support is absolutely amazing also. Money Dashboard and Love Money look like two best options out there now that Kublax closed their doors. Mint were making noises last year about spreading to UK/Canada, but I've not heard anything new about that. I don't have much to add other than your signature is not required to process a charge.  Signatures are kept on file for validity in the event you dispute a charge.  Your signature isn't held in some magical database with signature recognition software.  If you draw an shark in the signature section of a receipt that won't stop the charge from processing.  In fact, many merchants don't even bother requiring the signature below a certain threshold. There are loads of behind the scenes processing improvements offered by the EMV chip; namely prevention of card number skimming and duplication via encrypted transaction signing.  While requiring a PIN adds an additional layer of security, simply processing via chip dramatically improves the network fraud prevention tools in a manner that is almost completely transparent to the user. To your point, if your wallet is lost and an imposer holds your physical card there is no anti-fraud improvement.  At any rate, you have zero fraud liability in the US. Yodlee is the back-end which communicates with the banks, and Mint just provide a pretty layer on top. You can sign up for an account with Yodlee directly, which may give you the flexibility you need. I would investigate mint.com further.  Plenty of people have written off using them because Intuit purchased them, but that seems like cutting of your nose to spite your face. I think mint.com is worth it for its Trends functionality alone, not to mention its automatic categorization of your purchases, reminders when bills are due, notifications of increased credit card interest rates, and overdraft notices. I don't think mint.com schedules bills & deposits, but it tracks stocks & mutual fund investments and compares your portfolio returns against Dow Jones, S&P 500, or NASDAQ if you wish.  I'm not sure I see the advantage of manual transaction entry, but you can add cash or check transactions manually.  As I mentioned earlier, automated categorization is a great feature.  In addition, you can tag certain transactions as reimbursable or tax-related. If the primary feature you're interested in is stock quotes, maybe something like Yahoo Finance or Google Finance will be enough. I can personally recommend MoneyWell. I've been using it for about a month now, and version 1.5 that was just released is a great upgrade from the previous version. The developer was very responsive during the open beta period, and from what I understand an iPhone version is in the works. (and no, I don't work for the publisher!) That aside, I've used a few other packages. I tried out iBank, which was fairly nice, but the account downloading functionality left a lot to be desired. I come from a MS Money background, and I am used to a seamless, reliable download scheme, and iBank's was (unfortunately) neither. Otherwise the interface was very nice. I had settled on MoneyDance before I found MoneyWell, and it's a pretty nice package. Unfortunately it's a Java application and doesn't adhere to most OSX interface practices. While the account downloading is substantially better than iBank's, the ugly interface made moving away from it fairly easy once I found something that had feature parity.