Filed under: Retire, Wealth, Travel, Retirement Advice
So your 401K has been hammered and you’ll have to work to the age of 100 to afford retirement? Not necessarily, according to Kathleen Peddicord, an expert on retiring to less expensive places outside the U.S. There are, she told me, spots only a few hours of plane time south of the U.S. where an American could find a lifestyle much like at home for only $1,200 – $1,500 a month. If you’re willing to ‘go native’, you could “live very well for under $1,000″.
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Filed under: Banks, Technology
These days, there’s no reason to be stuck at a bad bank. Thanks to sites like MyBankTracker and FindaBetterBank, it’s easy to find the perfect bank without wasting an entire afternoon. If the last time you looked for a new bank was a few years ago, and you aren’t satisfied with your current bank or credit union, now’s a great time to take a look at new offerings from traditional banks and to check out the many new banks which have opened online.
To find the perfect bank, we recommend checking out the following tools that will help you narrow the search to banks that provide features and offers that are important to you and that you ask your social network what they think of particular banks.
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Filed under: Banks, Technology
Even though technology has come a long way and at most banks it is easy to pay your bills directly from your online banking solution, paying other individuals — even at the same institution — has been a pain. A new service called ZashPay from Fiserv aims to make paying friends and family simple, without the need for third party tools like PayPal. Person to person payments, like those ZashPay will enable, are expected to total $1.35 trillion in 2010, according to the Tower Group.
Continue reading ZashPay enables person to person payments from your bank account
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Filed under: Insurance, Health, Insurance – Health Insurance
Sometime in August, Patricia Holland will drop into Medicare’s dreaded doughnut hole. She is already bracing for that financial wallop.
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Filed under: Banks, Consumer Ally
Bank of America agreed to pay $195,000 in a settlement with the state of Missouri for making telemarketing calls to people who had put their names on a do-not-call list.
Consumers who signed up for the state’s list complained they received solicitations from the company, one of the nation’s four largest banks, prompting the Missouri Attorney General to reach an Assurance of Voluntary Compliance (AVC) saying the bank would stop.
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Filed under: Banks, Retire, In the News
Today the Treasury Department will announce that all payments from the U.S. government will be made electronically to consumers. So people receiving Social Security, Supplemental Security Income, Veterans, Railroad Retirement and U.S. government benefit recipients will receive benefits either through direct deposit into a bank account or through Treasury’s Direct Express debit card.
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Filed under: Banks, Retire, In the News
Today the Treasury Department will announce that all payments from the U.S. government will be made electronically to consumers. So people receiving Social Security, Supplemental Security Income, Veterans, Railroad Retirement and U.S. government benefit recipients will receive benefits either through direct deposit into a bank account or through Treasury’s Direct Express debit card.
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Filed under: Banks, Travel, Credit Cards
One of the best things about debit cards, in our opinion, is that carrying one frees you from having to carry around a lot of cash when you’re traveling and the associated risk of having it stolen. Instead, you can find a branch of your bank or get a card that gives you free out-of-network swiping, and simply get cash as you need it. (We’d like to point out that this is also really handy if you’re an impulse shopper whose money “burns a hole” in your pocket.)
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Filed under: Debt, Technology, Transportation, Economizer
Finding the best rate on a car loan has always been a time consuming task. While it was easy to see the super-prime rate of 0.0% at dealers and a range of rates on bank and credit union websites, finding your rate took more work.
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Filed under: Debt, Bankruptcy, As Seen on TV
This story was updated on June 8, 2010.
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