The Sun's Financial Diary

As the month of August has come to an end, it’s time to see how I did in the past month.
The first item on the score card is the monthly expenses. This is the first time in a while that I kept a complete record of how we spent the money this month. Not included [...]

I got the magazine for free from NetMagazines.com back in June with two-year subscription and I paid only $4.91 for S&H. I subscribed various financial magazines before, such as Money, Smart Money, Forbes, and Barron’s, but only for one or two years. The reason I eventually terminated all of them was that I couldn’t [...]

Received in the mail tonight, starting October 13th, the new Citi Dividend Reward program works as follows:

2% cash back on purchases made at supermarket, drugstores, and gas station;
2% cash back or more at convenience stores and for electricity, gas, water supply, refuse services, excluding phone services;
1% cash back on all other purchases;
1% cash back on [...]

I put up the Alta Vista translation button in my site today just for convenience, in case there is somebody across the world needs it. Later on, I decided to try it to see how it works and I selected Chinese. Well, a click on the flag brought me the translated text, which means it [...]

Do you go straight to the site or through a middle man? If the former is your choice, you probably missed some big cashbacks you could have earned on top of what your credit cards offer. There tons of sites offer cashback programs by shopping through them. You already spend the money, why not get [...]

“The workforce reduction notification is currently in progress. Unfortunately your position is one that has been eliminated.”

This was part of the lay off notice sent to RadioShack employees by email Tuesday, reported USAToday.
Have employers really become cold-blooded when they drop their hardworking workers? Or they are so desperate in cutting expenses that they can’t afford [...]

Ever since I subscribed a free magazine from TradePub.com (I had to make up some stories of what I do as the publications are supposed for professionals), I get email from them almost every day with offers for other magazines that they say I quality. So far I haven’t responded to any offer because I [...]

how much gas price had come down in your area in the past two weeks? For me, that’s 20 cents, from $2.99/galon regular to $2.79/galon. Nearly a 7% drop. You can check your local gas prices at GasBuddy.com.
BTW, I’m living in New Jersey.

Jonathan of MyMoneyBlog is having an interesting discussion on online file backup. It seems that while nobody doubts the importance of backing up files periodically, it’s hard to put everybody in the same boat when it comes to how important files should be stored, especially those files that you don’t want anybody else to access. [...]

If you are an AT&T customer, by now you probably have already been informed. Otherwise, here’s the story.
USAToday reported that hackers accessed credit cards and other personal information of AT&T’s nearly 19,000 customers over the weekend. As a result, AT&T shut down its online store and notified credit card companies of those customers being affected. [...]