Finance Industry News

My December post about Intuit’s decision to “end of life” Quicken Online and several recent press interviews have stirred up quite a bit of interest from the Quicken community about what’s next.  Since your feedback drives our product development, I thought I would say thanks to all of you who wrote in, and address a few pressing concerns.

•   Quicken Online End-of-Life – The Quicken Online “end of life” does not have any impact on Quicken Desktop products.  Quicken Online users will be migrated seamlessly over to Mint.com, preserving all of their account history and account connections.  On Mint.com, they’ll be able to track their investments, avoid more bank fees, and find more savings opportunities with a completely free product – while maintaining aspects from Quicken Online (like manual transaction entry).

•    Unified Platform – Instead of having three platforms – Quicken PC, Quicken Mac, and Mint.com – that are largely incompatible and have disparate feature sets, longer term (and a big caveat is this could be years away), I’d like to move personal finance to a unified platform.

Are you a long time Quicken PC user who wants to move to Mac? No problem, we have you covered (actu

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In order to encourage donations to Haiti, the U.S. Government recently announced that you are able to deduct taxes on cash donations to a list of approved IRS charitable organizations for the 2009 tax calendar year in addition to the 2010 tax calendar year (you usually can only deduct in the year that you donate).

IRS Haiti Donation Tax Law

Here are the details on deducting donations to Haiti:

• Only cash contributions made to these charities after Jan. 11, 2010, and before March 1, 2010, are eligible.

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Jumping on the “information anywhere” bandwagon, Citibank developed an iPhone app that lets customers check their credit card balances anytime. Apart from having it available for free, I like the fact that I can:

• Check my account balance anywhere, meaning that I can still see if I’m overspending while waiting in line to pay for a purchase.
• Figure out when the payment is due and then set reminders to pay for the amount due. While

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As I wrote yesterday, I cut my thumb on December 22, 2009. I went to the minor care center, which is an EXTENSION of the hospital’s own emergency room—it’s just in a different location. I know, because I called the hospital and they told me so. When I arrived at the minor care center, I noticed a sign posted on the window that read something like, “Christus Minor Care Center will bill this visit as an emergency room visit…”

Under my Aetna plan, emergency room visits are covered no matter the location. In fact, the Minor Care Center’s portion of the bill has been paid in full and is taken care of. The Minor Car

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Graduating from college and getting your first job comes with a sense of financial independence. However, financial independence comes with financial responsibility. As a college graduate living on your own you will probably have  rent payments, credit card payments and student loan payments among other financial obligations. So how do you balance building your savings with paying down your debt?

Without a doubt you should be making at least your minimum loan payments every month, but if you have extra money in your budget should you use it to further eliminate your debt? That depends.

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Sales of new homes fell by 7.6 percent in December – a somewhat unexpected result in a year that proved to be the worst on record. December’s sales fell to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 342,000 from an upwardly revised November pace of 370,000.

While some are predicting a recovery this year in the housing sector, others feel that the “shadow inventory” – that is, the large number of repossessed properties held by the banks and expected to find their way to the market this year – will quickly overwhelm demand, leading to a pullback in house prices.

Source: NY Times