The Sun's Financial Diary

Banks want your money and in order to get your money, they will pay you!
E-Loan just launched its own version of high-yield online savings account call E-Loan Savings Plus . To promote the new product, E-Loan is offering a $25 bonus for a new account from now till December 18th. The Savings Plus has tiered [...]

If you have most of your savings in the stock markets, you won’t be happy with what’s going on now on the Wall Street. Nobody will. Somehow, I become numb to the daily closing numbers because what happened today isn’t much different from yesterday, last week, or even a month ago, and try not to [...]

Last week, I showed a picture of a building which we visited when in China and asked whether you have any idea what it is. I don’t know exactly what your answer is, but what I am going to tell you may surprise you a little bit.
Well, the building in the picture is not an [...]

When TradeKing announced its special $50 new account bouns promotion early this month, the offer was set to expire tomorrow. Now, it looks like the discount broker has decided to extend the promotion one more month into November, a sign I see that the promotion is going pretty well. Actually, this is one of the [...]

The stock markets are pretty volatile these days with huge up-and-down swings happening almost on a daily basis (the past month has produced 5 of the 10 largest drops of the Dow). At the same time, gold, which I follow quite closely, also had some roller coaster rides lately, but the general trend of gold [...]

It’s not even November yet, but we already have our first snow of the season! I don’t remember when we had the first snow last, but sure not this early.

I am staying at home today with the kids to help them recover from the heavy jet lag. It’s so cold both outside and inside the [...]

In early September, I put up a post on the new Scottrade 3 commission free trades promotion. Because I have been a loyal Scottrade customer for many years and generally quite happy with their service, I wanted to share the promotion with everybody so people can save some money on commissions if they want to [...]

It seems that it was just last week I announced here that I am going to take a vacation in China. But good time did go very fast and my month-long break came to an end yesterday. We flew back from Beijing on Sunday, October 26. The plane touched down at Newark at 5:15 pm [...]

I opened a 529 college savings account for our second daughter last year four months after she was born. After some research, I decided to use Ohio CollegeAdvantage 529 Savings Plan because of the selections of investments (mostly Vanguard index funds) and the plan’s low cost. Since then I have been making  contributions to the [...]

So far I have talked about best cashback credit cards and credit cards with good gas rewards. Another category that I haven’t touched is cards with travel rewards. The reason for leaving out travel cards is that I don’t travel much, so there’s little chance I can get the maximum benefits from using travel cards [...]