Personal Finance Firewall» Technology

Meet Square, The iPhone Credit Card Processing Device

Jesse Michelsen — Tue, 25 May 2010 13:30:22 +0000

The new credit card processing iPhone has hit the market meaning that you can now swipe your card on your friend’s phone to loan them some money. Read this article to find out more about this new iPhone feature.

Editors note: This is availible for Android as well and although it is a pretty cool advancement, credit cards can be trouble especially the more convenient they become.

If you are looking for a way to get mobile payments then check out the new credit card processing iPhone. The wonders of technology never cease and this is an incredible breakthrough in payment processing.

Credit card processing iPhone

It has long been discussed how actual physical money would some day disappear and be replaced by the almighty plastic. Technical magazines and shows have long predicted a forecast of doom for coins and paper money. We are now in the middle of the information age where physical cash does not have to cross our palms in order to see the rewards of spending money.

The new credit card processing iPhone, called Square, was developed by Twitter’s Jack Dorsey. Right now it is in public beta, and looks good for the future. It is a cool add-on for the iPhone that allows anyone that owns an iPhone to accept payments with a credit card. The concept combines a small card reader with an iPhone application. This is a wave of the future and will be around for many years to come.

Best of all this credit card processing iPhone is available to the general public. There is no need to be a registered company in order to use it. All that is required is an account, a phone and the application. It’s as simple as that.

How it works

If you want to make a payment to someone who has this application on their iPhone all you need to do is key in or swipe your credit card numbers into the phone. You will then be able to write your signature on the touchscreen for verification purposes. Credit card processing has reached a new height with this handy application. Now anyone can accept a credit card, and what does that mean for the future?

There are so many uses for this credit card processing iPhone that it can be mind-boggling. Friends can give money to friends and small businesses can use it to increase their sales for people that like to use plastic only to make a purchase. There are no limitations on what can be done with this new technology.

This is a guest post contributed by Timothy a personal finance writer for CreditCardFinder.

Read Write Web Focuses in on Personal Finance

Jesse Michelsen — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 16:58:47 +0000

Over at Read Write Web last week there was an interesting article called How The Web is Transforming Personal Finance. Read Write Web is all about the advancements in web technology and often has articles about the next big web thing or highlights of some awesome new tool on the web that someone has created. I am somewhat surprised to see anything about personal finance on their site, but the web certainly has transformed personal finance.

This article is actually the first in a three month long series about personal finance so I am pretty excited to see what this web news site can dig up on personal finance, what tools they will be able to find and share with their readers, and what their general perspective is on personal finance. I will certainly share any other useful tidbits I find during their series.

This first article gave some highlights on Mint.com and on mobile personal finance, both of which I have talked about before. Here is what they had to say about Mint.com:

Mint stood out from the pack early on because the company made it extremely easy to keep track of all your expenses. After giving Mint access to your bank and credit card account, the service simply downloads your financial information at regular intervals and organizes it. Mint can even track your 401(k) for you.

Some other budgeting tools mentioned in the article are Wesabe, which GetRichSlowly.org has been a long time supporter of, moneyStrands, Geezeo and Kublax which is a service for U.K. users.

For the mobile world, the article mentions Wesabe and Mint’s mobile apps as well as the fact that many banks are making in house applications for the growing smart phone users of the world such as Bank of America, Chase, and Wells Fargo.

Over the last few years, the web has clearly transformed the way we use personal financial software.

I’m definitely looking forward to seeing how this series pans out and if you like, you can subscribe to their feed. They put out a ton of articles a week, most of which focus on the next new thing or whats hot in the web right now..really geeky stuff, but if you are that type, they are an awesome source for new tools.

Nothing sponsored here, I am just excited that a very big site outside of the general personal finance world is getting into the action.

How to Avoid Online Security Breaches

Jesse Michelsen — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 17:57:13 +0000

In light of my security problem last week, I thought I would detail the problem and talk a bit about security today.

Our whole lives are on the computers now. You have access to your bank accounts, taxes, credit cards and even mortgage online where just a few years ago, all those things were dealt with in paper.

The electronic age has certainly brought convenience but at what cost?

Last week, I learned a bit about that cost. My Gmail account was compromised. I was in my account around midnight, and in just a few hours, my account was accessed by someone else, my password was changed and I was helpless.

The worst part is, like many others I know, I used Gmail as a storage facility for far too many important things. I had passwords from all the sites I access archived in my Gmail account as well as some info about my taxes, myself and my wife, etc.

I’m not sure how this happened but I have a few ideas. Regardless of how, I want to insure that this doesn’t happen again.

Passwords are the gateway to your online life, why would you make your password something simple?

Here are some tips on making a more secure password which is the first step you should take to avoid security problems.

Don’t use anything that can be found in the dictionary, in any language. This may sound pretty difficult, but its really not that hard to come up with a system to create different, seemingly nonsensical passwords for each and every site you visit online.

For example, your password schema could be nursery rhymes. Each site you visit, you assign a nursery rhyme. For site #1, that may be: “Little Miss Muffet sat on her tuffet.” From that, your password would have LMMsoht in it (notice I left the captalization the same as the nursery rhyme, this adds additional complexity), but not only that, you could assign a numbering system to all the nursery rhymes you plan to use, so this would be nursery rhyme number 2. You could then add that to your password, LMMsoht#02. There you have a 9 character, complex password with capitals, numbers and special characters.

This is just an example of how your passwords could be created, I didn’t and you shouldn’t use this password schema now that it’s online. Pick a schema that you will remember, but others wouldn’t be able to guess easily.

You can use this site to test your password strength. Some sites have their own password strength tests when you create or change your password, but I find they are very different and some pretty simple passwords qualify as strong on some sites. This password checker is very strict, even the password created above doesn’t qualify for the best rating as it is.

You should also never use the same password for more than one website. I know this sounds difficult, but it really isn’t and it’s very important. Using our above password as an example, you could use this password as the base for your passwords for a related group of websites, and change it slightly for each website.

Our initial password could be LMMsoht#02 but in front of that, add something that specifies it to the site you will use it for, such as: emlactt1LMMsoht#02. This password gets the “best” rating on the password checker, because the added characters you are using to identify it to a certain website add extra length to the password. Once you figure out a schema, it is very easy to create, remember and continually change your passwords to create a more secure online experience for yourself.

Some other things I see all the time are people writing down their passwords and placing them under their keyboard at work, or in their desk drawer. Don’t do this! You never know who goes into the office after lights are out.
Never give your password to anyone else, through verbal or electronic communications. You never know who could overhear or intercept a message.
Never store your passwords electronically.

If you use such a schema as described above, don’t write down your passwords in their password form. You could make a spreadsheet of the nursery rhymes you plan to use, and assign them a number, but don’t identify them plainly to a website or make any notes disclosing what the schema is for. Chances are, even if someone found your spreadsheet, they wouldn’t be able to figure out what it was for or how passwords were created from those, unless you wrote it in the spreadsheet or told them how it was done.

Like I said, your passwords are the gateway to your online. Don’t make these mistakes. Identity theft is a huge problem, and identity theft protection is a huge industry but much of the identity theft that goes on today can be prevented if you take some simple steps to secure yourself.

Image by Anonymouscollective

5 Awesome Personal Finance Apps for Android

Jesse Michelsen — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 18:27:10 +0000

I mentioned earlier this month that I got a new phone for work. This is not just any phone, but the Android powered Hero from Sprint. The phone itself is sleek and just plain awesome; everything the iPhone has become, without any of the ATT/Apple strings attached. The iPhone app store equivalent, the Android Market has about 10,000 apps and because the Android OS is open source, the majority of these apps are free. I thought I would demo as many as I could handle this past few weeks in relation to personal finance and here are five of my favorite Personal Finance related Android apps, with key points in bold.

PageOnce Personal Assistant

Personal Assistant, by PageOnce is just that, a personal assistant. It has the ability to store a plethora of information such as bank account, credit card accounts, investment portfolios, appointments and it can even keep track of your Netflix queue and eBay auctions. With the bank accounts, once you add your accounts, the app organizes things very nicely to show balances as well as having detailed lists of all transactions. The app does the same thing for credit card accounts. One notable thing about the application is that it will send you emails when it detects something abnormal such as possible fraudulent purchases. The financial summary portion of the app is a great way to look at all your financial activity very quickly.

I’m very impressed with the applications user interface. Everything is slick, adding an account was easy and painless, and everything performs pretty well. Personal Assistant has two versions (free and $9.99), with limits on the number of accounts that you can add for the free version but I find the free version sufficient.

ShopSavvy

One of the coolest things I found out about the Android phone is that it has the ability to scan barcodes. There are probably two dozen barcode scanning apps at least but this is the one I found to be the easiest to use and most feature rich. After you scan a barcode, the app will automatically search online for the specific product as well as locally based on your GPS coordinates. It will give you seperate comparisons for all online locations and all local locations. The results all come up on the phone so there is no need to open a web browser unless you want to view the actual website selling the product, which makes the comparison much quicker, all on the phone.

Some of the other features the app has are the ability to save searches if the product isn’t found, so if the product is added to the applications database, it will alert you. The app also has a price alert which will email you if the price changes to your defined threshold, wishlists to keep track of things you want to buy, and a history of all the things you have scanned. Some of the other barcode apps I tried took a while to actual read the barcode, but I found the actual process of scanning with ShopSavvy to be quick and easy because of onscreen feedback and positioning assistance while scanning barcodes.

Upvise

A grocery list or price book is basically a list of things you buy and the price you paid so you can keep track of how much you paid, know when a sale is actually good or not and save on things you purchase often. Upvise is an app suite with contact management, RSS feeds and portable Wiki but the app in the suite that I got it for is the shopping list. I tried several shopping lists but none could compare to Upvise.

Essentially Upvise shopping list is a shopping list that you add all the things you need to buy onto the list. Then when you are at the store you can easily check off the things you bought but in this simplicity lies the complexity. The app also gives you the ability to record tons of information about the product such as price, quantity, units such as weight, packages, boxes or bags, and even isle number. The items you create are then stored in a database on the phone, so you add them to a “Buy list” when you need to buy them, and after you buy them, they are moved to an “All Items” list and stored till next time you need them. This alleviates the annoyance of having to re-add all the items you need to the list and it also accomplishes what Grocery Lists or Price Books do, such as recording the price so you can compare with the same item the next time you need it.

The app has the ability to add categories to the items on your list and create multiple lists so you can maintain a shopping list for each store you go to such as the hardware store and grocery store, or a list of Christmas presents you are shopping for. All the items added to the application are swappable from list to list, or addable to multiple lists so once you add something, you can just move it around.

I think the most exciting feature of the app though is the online interface. Typing things on your phone, even one as comprehensive and sophisticated as the Hero can be cumbersome, but with a web interface you can just type in all the things on your list online and the web database and phone database are periodically synced. You can add the items you need to your list online, and then when in the store, add the rest of the information for the item such as price and weight into your phone, and it syncs with the web database.

Mileage

One of the first apps I got when I got my phone was the Mileage app. The concept is pretty simple, you record your odometer reading at each fill-up along with the gallons of fuel purchased and the purchase price. The app automatically inputs the date (though you can change it if necessary) and saves each of your fill-ups. The great thing about the app though is that after you have entered some fill-ups, the app will use that data and give you information about your gas usage such as your average MPG, best and worst MPG, average amount paid for gas, the amount of gas you have purchased so far, the amount you spent on gas any given month or year, distance between fill-ups, and even a projections about future usage. The app doesn’t stop there, it also has pretty charts for all of this information and more.

Something else I discovered about the app while writing this post is that the app can record service information and alert you when you need service of any kind, not just oil changes. It checks your odometer input against the service info you want to know and tells you when you need to change your air filter, get your oil changed or rotate your tires. It has the ability to handle multiple vehicles as well.

Google Finance

How could I do a post about Android apps without highlighting Google’s own Finance application. This app is basically everything you get when you go to Google Finance, but on your phone. The user interface is nice and simple. The app gives you data and news about the major markets as well as quotes you search for.

The best thing about the app is it has the ability to pull portfolio data you enter into your Google Finance account. I was even able to import my transactions from my broker into my Google Finance account so this app shows ups and downs based on my purchase prices for stock. The quote search is comprehensive and will auto-complete for you so you don’t have to remember all those ticker symbol. It can even search by company name. The app also comes with a widget that can be added to your phones main screen. My only complaint about this app is the widget will only do individual stock tickers, and not your entire portfolio but overall it is a great app.

And there you have it. If you have an Android powered phone or plan on getting one in the future, these apps are all excellent and worth a try.

Update June 2010: As of this date, the Android platform has gained significant market share and there are ten times the amount of apps in the marketplace. Due to this, I thought it appropriate to publish a follow-up to this post, highlighting just a few more noteworthy apps. You can find that article here: 5 MORE Awesome Personal Finance Apps For Android