The Sun's Financial Diary

I have followed Kiplinger’s Personal Finance Magazine’s annual Best List for several years. The parts that I am particularly interested in are those bests in savings accounts, credit cards, and investments, topics that I discussed quite a lot here. Over the week, the December issue of the magazine arrived, with its 2010 list. When I [...]

SmartyPig, the social banking website that allows its customers to get help from friends and family members for achieving their savings goals, is now running a $5,000 “Race Out of Debt” contest from September 14th to September 27th. At the end of the contest, they will choose one lucky winner to receive a cash prize [...]

The current market environment has definitely not been kind to savers. The Fed has dropped interest rates to near record low levels in order to stimulate the economy. While that’s great news for anybody who may be in the market for a loan, it’s wreaking havoc on anybody looking for a halfway decent yield on [...]

In late April, SmartyPig, a social website that lets friends and family members contribute to one’s saving goals, generated quite some buzz in the PF blog community when it raised its savings account rate to 2.15% APY. The reason why the move received so much attention was that SmartyPig did that while other banks were [...]

On the day when the Fed chief indicated that the near-zero interest rate we had since December 2008 will be here to stay in order to combat the high unemployment rate (his comments also sent the stock market down sharply BTW), WTDirect, one of the popular online banks, announced that it’s increasing the yield of [...]

My folks are retired.  They have been for a good ten years now and in between travelling and soaking in the warm weather, they do their best to manage their investment portfolio to fund their retirement plans. They try to maintain a relatively safe portfolio that provides at least a decent return on their money [...]

Early last week, when I wrote about Sallie Mae’s latest interest rate adjustment for its high-yield savings account, I mentioned that I was thinking of getting one for myself because the new yield, 1.30% APY, is higher than what I get from my accounts with Ally Bank (1.20% APY) and EverBank (1.26% APY). Actually, I [...]

For the third time in a month, a bank has decided it’s time to give savers a little more return for their hard-earned money. On the heel of recent announcements from Capital One and SmartyPig that increased the interest rate of their respective savings account, Capital One 1.30% APY and SmartyPig 2.15% APY, Sallie Mae, [...]