The Sun's Financial Diary

Money Aisle is an online marketplace where banks compete to each other to offer better rates for high-yield savings account or CDs.
I have heard about MoneyAisle a while back, but never got a chance to check it out until recently, partly because back then I was very happy with Dollar Savings Direct’s 4.0% APY. But [...]

Looking for incentives to open a bank account? Following are some bonus offers valid for this month (March 2009) only. All of them are for checking accounts though.

M&T Bank is offering $100 bonus when opening a M&T Direct Checking, Classic Checking (with interest), Select Checking or Power Checking or $25 bonus for M&T Totally Free [...]

After being with the bank for only half a year, I think the time to move on has finally come.
When Dollar Savings Direct was first launched last summer, it was touted as a high yield savings account from Emigrant Bank, which also owns Emigrant Direct. You may wonder why one bank wants to have to [...]

Stocks are down (another 300-point plunge of the Dow today closing below 7,000 for the first time in 13 years) and savings account interest rates are declining too. Are you wondering where to put your money these days? Treasuries are safe, but you won’t get much from buying bonds/bills unless safety is your absolute concern. [...]

Yesterday, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. (FDIC) released its last quarter banking profile (PDF) of 2008 and the banking sector is still very weak, despite hundreds of billions of dollars infusion from the government. At the end of 2008, a total of 252 banks were placed on the FDIC’s problem bank list, up from 171 [...]

Last Friday, I received an email from Dollar Savings Direct, which currently holds most of our cash, another rate reduction notice. This time, the yield of their savings account was lowered from 3.20%, a rate that they just adopted a week ago, to 3.05%. I opened an account with DSD in November 2008 after monitoring [...]

It has been more than two weeks, but my PNC Bank Business Checking Account is finally up and running. The waiting is much longer than I expected and what happened after the account was opened was more troublesome.
When I opened the account at the branch, I was told to select a PIN so I can [...]

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 of the [...]

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 are [...]

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 rate [...]