The Sun's Financial Diary

If you are currently investing money in an Individual Retirement Account (IRA), you may be considering having the money rolled over to a Roth IRA. 2010 is the first a traditional IRA can be converted to Roth IRA without income limit. But before you make any changes, you should be clear about the details of [...]

I didn’t even know the two were actually working together until I read an article on CNNMoney yesterday. I compared Mint and Yodlee last year after trying Mint.com and noticing some expenses were wrongly categorized (not just wrong, very wrong). At that time, my conclusion was the Yodlee did a better job in putting expenses, [...]

As personal incomes remain somewhat stifled and the stock market still struggles to find direction, a lot of people have begun rediscovering a financial planning tool that started to make a disappearing act – the budget.  With many people living on tighter means, managing every dollar has become more and more important. Creating an effective [...]

If you are looking for the best deals this holiday season, you may want to check out MasterCard MarketPlace. MasterCard MarketPlace is an innovative program that provides all eligible MasterCard cardholders who enroll online here at the program Web site (marketplace.mastercard.com) with hundreds of tailored discount offers each week, based on their merchant preferences, ZIP code, [...]

A few days before Black Friday, I replaced my 3-year old Sony Vaio laptop with a new E Series laptop, from the same manufacture. After comparing different brands, such as Dell, HP, Acer, and Toshiba, etc, I decided to go with Sony again because I could configure it to exactly what I want. Eventually, I [...]

As we enter the holiday season, most of us pause to reflect on how fortunate we are. Whether it be the warmth of friends and family near, good health or roof over our head or all of the above, chances are that the vast majority of us have many reasons to be grateful. On a [...]

Whether or not you find your finances, money and the economy fascinating, it is important that you afford your finances the same rapt attention you would your chosen hobby or favourite TV show. So you’ve heard this before? You know how important it is to pay attention to your finances and monitor your spending and [...]

Bank of America made news in recent weeks by announcing that they are in essence ending their “free checking” product.  This is in and of itself is not a huge piece of news as banks have begun phasing out their free products for a while now as they are under the gun to increase profitability.  [...]