The Sun's Financial Diary

Look at that! Yesterday, hours after I wrote an article on SmartMoney’s 2012 Best Brokers Survey, in which I wondered how come Zecco and TradeKing were ranked next to each other in the magazine’s annual rating, an email from Zecco arrived, with the subject line “Zecco and TradeKing Are Merging”. I have to say that [...]

I have followed SmartMoney Maganize’s annual survey of online discount stock brokers for some time, writing the first post about the survey in 2009. In the past, when I looked at the ranking of best and worst brokers, there were always some surprises, especially when brokers I have never heard of were thrown in the [...]

With the economy the way it is, stress for all of us is at an all-time high while the money in our bank accounts may be struggling at an all-time low. Don’t neglect your sanity (or your blood pressure), though. Fortunately there are plenty of ways to de-stress at a discounted price. So the next time [...]

Well, almost. A while ago, shortly after we moved from New Jersey to Virginia, I wrote a post on why we still bank with Bank of America. In that article, I listed a few reasons for staying with the bank when there were a lot of talks about moving away from big banks such as [...]

Got a household problem or challenge that needs a solution? Chances are you don’t have to spend a dime to find it. There are plenty of multi-tasking items around your home masquerading as plain old ordinary “stuff”. If you want to solve your dilemma while saving some money, too, get ready to help some of [...]

In the past, I have wrote about different versions of credit cards from Citibank that offer cardholders ThankYou Points as rewards, including ThankYou Preferred Card and Premier Card, which I own. Those are the cards for people with excellent credit who are looking for credit cards with decent rewards. With those Citi ThankYou cards, members [...]

From what I heard, it will be coming this fall. I have been a loyal Scottrade customer for nearly 10 years. During this time, I have opened trading accounts with multiple brokers, each of which has its own services and features, but Scottrade has always been my primary broker for most of the trades I [...]

It’s cheap. It’s warm. It’s (usually) super easy to make, and it’s tummy-filling. What it often is not, though, is exciting. Let’s face it, soup can be plain old boring. But many of us could benefit from having soup as a main meal at least a couple times a week. Fortunately, though, there’s many ways to gussy up [...]