The Sun's Financial Diary

I was reading an article, A Boost in Online Money Courses, on the Wall Street Journal yesterday, and from there I went to a website called Open Courseware Consortium. This is the first time I knew the existence of such a website, so I decided to check it out. So what is Open Courseware? An [...]

Another piece of good news for first-time home buyers from Washington. U.S. Senate on Wednesday approved a provision that will first-time give homebuyers up to $15,000 tax credit as part of the stimulus plan sought by President Obama. According to an article on NYT, the measure would give buyers a tax credit of 10 percent [...]

As online banks keep slashing rates, it’s getting harder and harder to find to find a decent rate from popular banks, whose rates are mostly in the mid-2% range now. To find a good rate, you will have to beyond those banks that we used most often. Recently, I noticed a few such banks which [...]

For sometime, E*Trade has been pretty good at holding the yield of their Complete Savings Account at 3.01% APY, becoming one of the bright spots when everybody else was in the cutting mood. But that finally came to an end, like all the good things. E*Trade announced yesterday that effective Monday, February 2nd, the new [...]

Yes, that sounds unbelievable (I thought only payment history, utilization ratio, credit length, etc, determine credit score), but it could actually happen. Watch this video on Good Morning America yesterday first if you missed the show on TV. Kevin Johnson, who, at 29 years old, is the CEO of a PR firm in Atlanta and [...]

In late December, I took advantage of the free filing offer from MyCorportation (MyCorporation reviews) and registered my own company for my little online business (and saved $149 filing fee ). I am glad the whole process went very smoothly without any incident. About two weeks ago, the package arrived with the certificate and my [...]

The tax season is just around the corner, did you get your tax preparation software yet? If not, do you know which software you want to use if it’s the first time you use a tax preparation software to file your income taxes? When I posted the tax software giveaway last week, I also included [...]

Last update: December 31, 2009. 2009 is less than one month old, there are already a few banks being closed, picking up what was left from last year. A total of 25 banks were shut down in 2008. So far in 2009, three have gone under already (the list will be updated continuously as new [...]