Does Anybody Use Wesabe?

An article in SmartMoney inspired me to construct the poll "Which financial account management website do you use?" in the sidebar of my blog. Here is a link to the original article at SmartMoney.com: Which Financial Planning Web Site Is Best For You?

The article mentions a website called Wesabe.com, and lists it first among the three sites listed. QuickenOnline.com and Mint.com were the other two sites that they listed. As a history lesson, Quicken bought Mint, and if you try to access Quicken Online, you will end up on the Mint web site. So, the article really only mentions two financial websites.

Anyway, I have had the financial account management website poll up on my blog sidebar for a while now, and so far nobody has responded that they use Wesabe to manage their finances. So, my question to my readers is "Does anybody use Wesabe?" Anybody at all? If so, I would like like to hear what the benefits are.

Personally, I use Yodlee to track my finances, and so do the majority of PFStock.com readers. I usually find very good insights presented in SmartMoney but in this case I find their advice dubious as they didn't even mention Yodlee in their article.

PFS

Bing Cashback Program Will Be Discontinued

Do you use Bing Cashback? I have been using this feature to earn cash back on some of my online purchases. This was a Microsoft service that paid shoppers to search for and purchase items through their Bing search engineg. Microsoft has just announced that they are discontinuing the program. Does anybody have an opinion on this?

Here is the text of the message that they just sent me:

Dear valued cashback customer:

We are writing to notify you that the Bing cashback program will be discontinued, and the last day to earn cash back on your Bing Shopping purchases will be July 30, 2010.

Until July 30, 2010 9:00 pm PST, it's business as usual so continue to take advantage of great offers from your favorite merchants. You can redeem all of your earned cashback savings consistent with the cashback terms and conditions and access the Bing cashback customer support system through July 30, 2011. We encourage you to redeem your cashback savings and to further support redemption, we are waiving the $5 minimum payout effective July 31, 2010. To assist with prompt delivery of your cashback earnings, please visit http://cashbackaccount.bing.com to ensure your account information is current. For more details and answers to your questions, please visit our frequently asked questions page.

Thank you very much for being a loyal cashback user. We remain committed to delivering great value to our customers, and we are currently working on an exciting new program which you will hear more about from us later this summer.

Sincerely,

Bing cashback team

Is Toddler Toothpaste Useless Junk?

Some readers know that I have a 2-year old daughter, and I will admit that this post is little bit off topic for a personal finance blog. But one thing that I wanted to talk about is toddler toothpaste. These products are sold under such names as Orajel Toddler Training Toothpaste, and Gerber Infant Tooth and Gum Cleanser.

The product claims to be fluoride free and safe to swallow. But, I did my best to switch my daughter over to regular fluoride toothpaste as soon as she turned two years old. I've had issues with toddler toothpaste for a couple of reasons. First of all, toddler toothpaste has no fluoride in it, and this makes me question its usefulness. Toddler toothpastes are not accepted by the American Dental Association (ADA) as being effective in the prevention of cavities. In my view, this makes their intended purpose dubious at best.

About the only real claims that the manufacturers have made is that their product tastes good, and it can be swallowed by your child. Therein lies my problem! My daughter likes the taste, and treats the toothpaste like a food. I've probably gone through a dozen mangled toothbrushes due to my daughter chewing on the toothbrush until the bristles are unrecognizable. Brushing was a constant struggle with my daughter trying to eat the toothbrush, and me trying the extract the brush from her jaws.

After finally switching to a fluoride toothpaste (Kid's Crest), I had to later teach my daughter the exact opposite behavior: not to swallow the toothpaste. Swallowing too much fluoride can cause fluorosis or spots on your child's permanent teeth. Also, it was important to teach her to rinse her teeth thoroughly. This is how the lengthy process of unlearning a behavior went.

In my experience toddler toothpaste has little to no benefits, and in our case only led to struggle, frustration and conflict when brushing my child's teeth. I don't know about other parents, but I would consider such a product to be defective. At this point, if I had it to do over, I would not buy any toddler toothpaste, and just use a toothbrush moistened with water until my child was two years old. Does anybody else share my opinion that toddler toothpastes are useless junk?

PFS

Additional Comments on Yodlee

I was going to write some more of my own comments about Yodlee. It seems that Peter Hazlehurst (Senior Vice President at Yodlee) had left a comment on my previous post about Yodlee, but that comment has since been deleted. Nevertheless, Yodlee's customer service has been mostly responsive to my concerns. They have corrected the problems that I had experienced with my Bank of America and Chase accounts. However, a new problem has cropped up with one of my banks: Discover Bank. My account balance will update, if I manually update Yodlee. But the DiscoverBank balance doesn't update automatically, like all my other accounts. I sent a service request to Yodlee Customer Care a couple of months ago, but the problem has yet to be resolved.

My accounts that were previously unsupported by Yodlee are still unsupported. For example, my 401(k) account at JP Morgan remains unsupported. In my previous post, I mentioned something called Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) that JP Morgan uses. Some readers are probably not familiar with his technology, so I'll summarize it here. If I try to access my JPMorgan account from a new computer, their website will not recognize me even if I entered the correct username and password. Then their website will prompt me to choose to receive an "Activation Code" via my home phone, text message, or Email message. I then have to enter that code into the website for them to recognize my computer and grant access to my account information. This registration has to be done once for each computer that you use to access your account. It appears that Yodlee doesn't support this JP Morgan account registration system.

However, I also have several Chase bank accounts that use a similar MFA system, and they seem to work fine in Yodlee. Remember that both JP Morgan and Chase are all part of one big company: JPMorgan Chase & Co. (NYSE: JPM). So, I'm thoroughly confused as to why Yoddle would support one but not the other.

Lastly, one reader has asked me how to track stocks on Yodlee that are not held in a brokerage account. For example, one could hold 200 shares of Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) in certificate form. I know that you can setup a manual account on Yodlee where you can put in an estimate of the value of your stocks, but I haven't figured out how to have that updated automatically. Such a feature would also be useful to track the value of gold or silver bullion that one holds in a safety deposit box.

Note: Please also participate in the poll about financial account management websites in the sidebar.

PFS

How Much Have You Saved For Retirement?

If you have been keeping up with the news, you may have read a recent headline that says something to the effect that "43% of Americans have saved less than $10k for retirement". The original source of this headline is the Employee Benefit Research Institute (EBRI). For their study, the institute surveyed 1,153 individuals (902 workers and 251 retirees) age 25 and older in the United States by random phone call.

I have extracted the relevant table from page 16 of the report titled "The 2010 Retirement Confidence Survey".

This figure shows total savings and investment reported by workers (among those who provided a response) and does not include the value of their primary residence or defined benefit plans. Some of the commonly quoted statistics from this report are:

27% of American workers reported having less than $1,000 set aside for retirement.
43% of American workers reported having less than $10,000 set aside for retirement.
54% of American workers reported having less than $25,000 set aside for retirement.

The entire report can be found here.

I thought that this issue of retirement savings would be a good topic for a new poll: "How much have you saved for Retirement?" Please participate by selecting an answer in the sidebar of my blog. I hope to review the results at a future date. As always, anonymous comments are welcome on PFStock.com.

PFS

The Millionaire's Rule of Thumb

In the landmark book, The Millionaire Next Door by Thomas J. Stanley and William D. Danko, the authors present a now well-known formula for one's expected net worth. Unfortunately, it seems that the result of the formula has been repeatedly misinterpreted as a hard limit, where if you are below this number, you are considered "poor", and if you are above it, you're "rich". But, there is not a single break point that divides Prodigious Accumulators of Wealth (PAWs, the "rich") and Under Accumulators of Wealth (UAWs, the "poor"). Instead there is a broad middle range that the authors call Average Accumulators of Wealth (AAW).

Admittedly, the way in which Stanley and Danko presented the formula for expected net worth in their book is perhaps the source of much of this confusion. (See Wealth According to The Millionaire Next Door.) To be a PAW one needs to have at least twice their expected net worth. Instead of repeating the often misinterpreted formula here, I will present a simplified version of what the authors tried to convey in their book.

Take your age, and divide by 5. Multiply the result by your annual income. If your net worth is at least that amount, then you are a PAW (i.e. wealthy).

Suppose that one is 40 years old and has an annual income of $80,000. In this case, 40/5=8. So, to be "rich" at 40, one needs to have 8X their annual income or $640,000 in this example.

But, you are not necessarily a UAW if you have less than $640,000. The converse formula is:

Take your age, and divide by 20. Multiply the result by your annual income. If your net worth is less than that amount, then you are a UAW (i.e. "poor").

Using the same example, 40/20 = 2. So, one is poor at age 40, if their net worth is less than 2X their annual income, or $160,000 in this case.

I think that blog posts that discuss The Millionaire Next Door often illicit responses like: "The formula is flawed," or "This is nonsense." Indeed, broad rules of thumb like this one can have their limitations. I think that the authors only intended this formula to be a rough measure of one's wealth. On the other hand, if you find yourself making excuses as to why you can't achieve at least the lower limit of AAW status, then you are exactly what the authors have profiled as a UAW. My definition of a UAW is one that fits the formula and has a dozen "reasons" why he or she is stuck there.

Another typical reaction to the Millionaire's formula is people who say the formula is nonsensical, and that they will then develop a new and improved formula. Presumably, this new formula will show that they aren't doing so badly after all. In any case, I won't hold my breath for a new and improved breakthrough formula to come out.

Regardless of whether or not you agree with the Millionaire's Rule of Thumb, I think that everyone can strive to do better. Let me offer these words of encouragement: If you are a UAW, you can strive to become an AAW; if you are an AAW, you can strive to become a PAW. I wish you good luck in this endeavor.

Further Reading:
Wealth According to The Millionaire Next Door.
As a Rule of Thumb.

PF Stock

Has Anyone Received Their Tax Refund?

In January, I wrote a post that tries to answer the question: When will I get my 2010 tax refund? My post shows a table of when to expect your tax refund if you E-filed your return. It is now early March, and everybody who filed before February 11, should have already received their refund. So, I want to ask the question, "has anybody received their tax refund yet?"

I estimate that most people have yet to file their 2010 taxes. In my case, I received my last 1099 form just last week, so things are going slowly. But once you do file, you are likely to anxiously check your mail or bank account for your refund. Last year (in 2009), I have heard some anecdotal stories about the Internal Revenue Service taking a lot longer to process refunds, so I'm curious how the IRS is doing this time around.

As always, anonymous comments are welcome on PFStock.

See also: When Will I Get My 2011 Tax Refund?

PFS