This promotion as ended, but you can still open a E*Trade savings account with a great interest rate.

Be Unbeatable! That’s the slogan splashed across the page of this ETrade promotional offer of $50 free for opening a new ETrade Money Market Account (sent to me by loyal reader Charles, Thanks Charles!). As a side sweetener, you get a 5.15% interest rate on the account for the first three months. After that three month teaser rate, the rate falls to 1.51%.

If you have a balance under $1000 you’ll be dinged with a $10 monthly fee but otherwise I see nothing that should hold someone back from taking a free $50. Anyone else see something I missed?

Fine print:

$50 will be credited to your new E*TRADE® Money Market account within 30 days of the account being funded with a minimum deposit of $100. Payments will be reported as interest income. Accounts must be opened by September 30, 2006 to qualify for the $50 offer. Must be a new account opened with new funds. Offer applies to one new account per customer. Not good with any other offer. This offer is not valid for E*TRADE FINANCIAL employees.

Relevant Fees:

A $100 minimum deposit is required to open a new EMM and account holders must maintain a minimum average monthly balance of $1,000, or $5,000 in total E*TRADE Bank deposits, by the end of their second statement cycle to avoid a $10 monthly fee.

A few months ago I blogged about a calculator that would sum up how much your personal data would cost and, at least for me, it was an eye-opening experience as to how little it costs to learn so much about a particular person. The calculator was based on the going rates are a number of different data brokers (they listed Accurint, Aristotle, ChoicePoint, ChoiceTrust, DocuSearch, Experian, KnowX, Merlin Data, and Pallorium) but the bottom line is many of those data brokers get their information from one Lexis Nexis – “the world’s largest collection of public records.” (among other things)

I went to each of the various data broker’s sites to see what they offered and it was once again an eye opening experience as to what these folks offered. Keep an eye out, I might start researching myself and seeing what turns up!

(Click to continue reading…)

If you’re like me, you probably will have a handful of jobs during your college undergraduate career ranging in length from a real summer internship all the way to a simply work-study at the college bookstore during the semester. No matter what it is, it’s important that you keep your resume up to date every semester because you never know when 1) you’ll need a copy of your resume 2) how much of your work experience you’ll actually remember.

Recently, I was trying to recall all the jobs I held during my college career and while I remembered most of my “real” jobs, I completely forgot about the semester I was a teaching assistant and the one where I was a work-study in some department’s IT group. Honestly, those two jobs aren’t truly resume worthy, I had meaty enough internships to take up the space, but had I needed them I didn’t remember enough to even try to make them resume worthy. That’s why you need to write your work as you do it (or soon thereafter) so that you accurately capture what you did.

This was a suggestion I mentioned in a prior post (update your resume every 3 months) but I felt it was an important enough tip to bring up again.

This article is part of a new series I’ve started called Personal Finance for College Students (hence, PF College).

A Roth IRA is one of the most intruiging and most often discussed (argued) means of saving for your retirement. You contribute post-tax dollars into a retirement account that will appreciate tax free. You can also withdraw your contributions (but not the appreciate of those contributions) tax free at any time. While the awesomeness of the Roth IRA can and probably will debated until the end of time, let’s move past that for now.

The only significant requirement that a college student needs to know is that you can’t contribute more than what you earn in a year. So if you had an income of $2,000, as reported on your tax return, then you can’t contribute the maximum of $4,000 – you can only put in $2,000 (because that’s your income). What’s nice is that there is no requirement that the money you contribute has to be the money you actually earned, so you can earn $2k, spend it on books, tuition, beer (just kidding Mom!), etc.; and then get $2k from your parents to put into your Roth IRA and it’s entirely legitimate.

Why should you (and your parents) do this? That $2,000 can do so much more for you, growing tax free, than it can for your parents from a retirement funding perspective, if you consider that you are four decades away from retirement. While you are young and can afford it, saving as much as you can in retirement is crucial because time is on your side.

Don’t really want to ask for a few thousand dollars from your parents for “retirement” (especially since they will probably be helping as much as they can for school)? Structure it as a loan and pay that loan back after you graduate and start working, they’ll appreciate how responsible you are in thinking of your retirement.

This article is part of a new series I’ve started called Personal Finance for College Students (hence, PF College).

Last week I played around with my personal details on Kanetix and we learned how the various characteristics affected the premiums you could expect to pay on auto insurance. Today, I played with the numbers some more, this time changing the various coverages and they behaved just as you’d expect.

One thing that was interesting was that when I played this game at the end of August, the companies listed weren’t the same ones that were listed today. The four companies I saw most often were Unitrin Direct, Travelers, MetLife Auto, and Electric Insurance Company (Drive Insurance from Progressive made an appearance too).

• When I took away the towing and/or rental coverage, the quotes from some companies didn’t change. That’s not to say that the coverage is free but when they’re trying to capture business, the $3 (towing) or $5 (rental) is small potatoes.
• The values in the row for bodily injury/property damage coverage for $25k/$50k/$25k is not a typo, it really only differed by a quarter! Also, $20k/$40k/$15k was also not that big. I suspect it’s because many states have minimums on how much insurance you must carry and these values are far lower than the ones at least in Maryland.
• What’s interesting is the curve that the prices take when plotted against the coverages. For example, the increase going from a $1000 deductible to a $500 deductible was only $66.88 per six months. If you go from $1000 to $250 you’re talking a price difference of $125.00. I expected the the curve would be steeper.

As a reminder, here were the baseline characteristics I input:

Benchmark - One car with one driver garaged in the zip code where I live in what can be classified as suburbia. I’m male, 26, single, own a home, Master degree, engineer, with current employer for 3 years, licensed since 16, never suspended or revoked, not been ordered to carry an SR-22, 0 violations, residential insurance policy, no defensive driving-type course. I own my 2003 Toyota Celica, I drive it to and from work (~10 miles, 5 days), putting on approximately 12k miles/yr.



The coverages I selected are $100k/$300k/$100k for Bodily Injury and Property Damage and the same for Uninsured/Underinsured Motorists and UM/UIM Property Damage. Personal Injury Protection-Medical (and Funeral) Expenses set at $2500 Basic (everyone covered). $1000 deductible on both Comprehensive and Collision, yes to Towing and Rental coverages.

Benchmark Rates: 4 results, Average rate of $617.25. The quote at the end of August was for $628.70, but I’m pretty sure the difference was because of the different companies and because I probably entered in some of my information different (not every question is covered in the benchmark information I listed above). Regardless, it shouldn’t affect the analysis, you just can’t compare the numbers today with the ones in August (not that you would anyway).

Rental and Towing Service Coverages:

Collision and Comprehensive (C/C) Coverage: (baseline $1000k deductible)

Collision and Comprehensive Coverage are usually connected, the deductible you select on one is the what you will use for the other.

** If you don’t elect collision or comprehensive insurance, you can’t have rental or towing coverage. The value in the table wasn’t changed to reflect the $8 difference, but if it were included then the price for coverage would be $372.50, a drop of 39.65%.

Bodily Injury, Property Damage Coverage (plus Uninsured/Underinsured) (baseline $100k/$300k/$100k)

Your uninsured/underinsured motorist coverage can’t exceed your regular bodily injury and property damage coverage so the two match in both instances below. So, if it says $250k/$500k/$100k then you get $250,000 personal injury, $500,000 accident coverage, and $100,000 property damage coverage. Normally, you can elect to have lower uninsured/underinsured but we didn’t in our analysis.

Personal Injury Protection-Medical (and Funeral) Expenses – includes reimbursement for Lost Wages

This is called PIP, or no-fault coverage, and legally required in Maryland. The baseline had it set at $2500 Basic which covers everyone, the one listed in the table below is the Limited version which covers only persons under 16.

No matter what you’re doing and how competant the person is you’re dealing with, always follow up.

When I left my former employer on August 25th, I knew that my final paycheck would be a paper one, not a direct deposit as it had been for the last three years. I assumed that it would likely be mailed out on or near the last day of the month. So imagine my consternation when I opened my mailbox all of this week (now the third week of September) and still no paycheck. So, I called the only person in Human Resources that I knew, was routed to Payroll where I discovered my paperwork conveniently came in “yesterday” and my paycheck would be mailed out today. It’s pretty ridiculous that it took 18 business days (28 if you consider they knew for two weeks) to “process” my resignation, one that was as vanilla as they came.

But, that was my fault. My file could’ve just been sitting under a stack of papers that the processor never got to, an honest mistake by anyone and one I am willing to accept. I should have called after 5 days to inquire about my final paycheck, not 15 days. I could claim excuses like how I was busy with the new job, which I was, and how I had to help with a conference, which I did, and how I generally found myself unwilling to talk to someone on the phone about something that probably was already in the mail… but it’s still my fault for not following up. Everyone always claims to be busy, but the phone call took all of five minutes and I have 1440 minutes to choose from during the day to handle my business.

So while that lesson cost me little (for the nitpicky, it cost me a few cents in interest), it taught me that no matter how competant you think the other person or organization is, always follow up because everyone can make an honest mistake.

Kiplinger’s took a look at the consumer price index released on September 15th for August and crunched some numbers to predict/project how the IRS would adjust the tax brackets and other tax breaks to prevent inflation from invisibly moving folks from bracket to bracket. Remember, these numbers are just projections,

• Personal exemption – increases to $3400 from $3300 (+$100).
• Standard deduction -
  • Single – increases to $5350 from $5150 (+200).
  • Married – increases to $10700 from $10300 (+$400)

Projected 2007 Tax Tables:

Up to $7,825 taxed at 10%
$7,826 – $31,850 taxed at 15%
$31,851 to $77,100 taxed at 25%
$77,101 to $160,850 taxed at 28%
$160,851 to $349,750 taxed at 33%
Over $349,750 taxed at 35%

Current 2006 Tax Tables:

Up to $7,550 taxed at 10%
$7,550 – $30,650 taxed at 15%
$30,650 – $74,200 taxed at 25%
$74,200 – $154,800 taxed at 28%
$154,800 – $336,550 taxed at 33%
Over $336,550 taxed at 35%

There are a few other extraneous tax rule predictions too available from the original article.

Flexo talks about his decision to start (and complete, congrats!) his MBA program at the University of Phoenix.

Blog vengeance comes to a head with Five Cent Nickel’s latest post about how simplybunkbeds.com misled him and his family by sending him a pair of pine bunkbeds instead of ash bunkbeds. Now, you may say, why is that a big deal? Well, when I pay for one thing based on a description on a website, I expect to get it. If I don’t, I expect the company to take the products back asap… not two weeks later.

Dad talks about where
to buy TMX Elmo, which is shaping up to be this winter’s hottest toy.

JLP talks about how to write a personal mission statement.

MBH gives a good methodology for comparison shopping on eBay.

FMF explains why paying the minimum on your credit card will cost you big.

Looks like there are now eleven Vanguard Target Retirement Funds, My Retirement Blog takes a look at them.

Home Insurance Guide discusses the various home insurance riders like jewelry and artwork and approximately how much each one should cost.