EconomyEinstein

The good folks at Quicken now have a great new free service called Quizzle that will pull your credit report, give you a credit checkup and show you a credit score. It's known as a Quizzle score but it's pretty darn close to what you'll see if you request a FICO score.
From the website...
"Quizzle is the only place that gives you a simple understanding of your home and your money, all in one spot. You'll get a free evaluation of your credit, home value, mortgage, budget and more, then get important tips on how to make the most of them (minus the confusing financial jargon). Just enter your zip code to get the simple home know-how you can't get anywhere else."
It's definitely worth a look.

In statistics, a moving average or rolling average is one of a family of similar techniques used to analyze time series data. It is applied in finance and especially in technical analysis. It can also be used as a generic smoothing operation, in which case the raw data need not be a time series.

A moving average series can be calculated for any time series. In finance it is most often applied to stock prices, returns or trading volumes. Moving averages are used to smooth out short-term fluctuations, thus highlighting longer-term trends or cycles. The threshold between short-term and long-term depends on the application, and the parameters of the moving average will be set accordingly.

Mathematically, each of these moving averages is an example of a convolution. These averages are also similar to the low-pass filters used in signal processing.

Running Average, on the other hand, is a method for continuously updating the average of a data set while including all of the data in that set that has been received until that point.

Want more of the gory details? [Source:Wikipedia.com]

Recently Verizon, T-Mobile, AT&T and Sprint have begun offering all you can gab programs for around $100.00 a month. Is it worth it? Maybe not.
Americans spend an average of $73.00 a month on cell service [Source:Money Magazine] already so there's probably only a small percentage of people are actually going to save money. If you generally exceed your allotted minutes, if you regularly hit with triple digits on your bill, or are looking to drop your landline, then yes. Otherwise, save your money.

Swipe your debit card at the checkout register and there's an increasing chance that more than the purchase price and tax will be subtracted from your checking account. A fee for using the debit card also may be deducted. Debit card fees have been around a long time but they used to be pretty rare; now they're much more common.

The key to avoiding this charge is to say "credit card" when asked if you want your purchase treated as debit or credit. Here's the rest of the story [Source: bankrate.com]

If you cook, you're already saving money. That $10 to $20 you'd fork over for an entree can fund several homemade meals for a single person or feed the whole family, depending on the size of everyone's appetite. Kudos to you for getting more greens for your green.

However, cooking can get expensive if you buy too many kitchen gadgets, make poor grocery choices or panic shop for each night's supper. Also, the recent price hike in everyday staples such as milk and cereal means that smart, thrifty food shopping is more important than ever.

The rest of the story is here [bankrate.com]

Eliminate the need to manage multiple Web sites to get a comprehensive view of your personal finances. Mint.com connects securely with more than 5,000 US financial institutions. By adding your bank, credit card and investment accounts to Mint.com, you get a complete perspective of your finances in one, easy to use location. Planning your personal budget just got a lot easier.

Mint.com seriously fills a sorely needed solution for managing personal finance. If you find it too hard or just too annoying to use Quicken or Microsoft Money, this one's for you. I use it myself and I love it! No more manual updating of my accounts, Mint.com downloads it all for me into one easy to use system that can show me where money is going.

Mint.com

When it comes to personal information, your credit report is just the tip of the iceberg. Insurers, landlords, banks and other companies have access to additional personal data about you, and if that information is wrong, you're in trouble.

Among the information in these reports are your current and past medical conditions, residential and tenant history, check-writing history and homeowner and car insurance-claim history. While not every American has a report, many do, and it pays to find out if the information collected on you is accurate.

Guess what? You can get a free copy of that report too!
Specialty consumer reports reveal your secrets [Bankrate.com]

Thinking about buying a Patriot Bond (Series I)? You might want to think again. Series I bonds have been used to guaranteed principal, interest AND adjust for inflation (thus the "I"). Bonds bought after May 2008 are no longer adjusted for inflation. What that means is that buying a Series I bond is now, by definition, a nearly guaranteed money losing proposition.

If you're confused about the best place to buy airline tickets here's a tip: AVOID Travelocity, Orbitz and Hotwire. Use a fare comparison aggregator first. They aren't travel agencies, they are resources that check several (and in some cases, hundreds of) websites for the best deal, something you'd be hard pressed to do as a mere mortal.
Those sites include ...

• Kayak.com


• Sidestep.com


• FareCompare.com


• Mobissimo.com

All are good for checking fares and comparing with Mobissimo being exceptional at International fares. Go ahead and check them now, links open in a new window.

NEVER go to an airline's site directly unless it's Southwest (unavailable through aggregator fare services). You could take the step of seeing who has the best deal and then booking directly on a carrier's website though.

If you thought gas prices were rising too quickly, check out what's been happening to text messaging.

Since 2005, rates to send and receive text messages on all four major carrier networks have doubled from 10 cents to 20 cents per message. This percentage of increase is on par with similar price hikes at the gas pump as crude oil prices skyrocket. In 2005, Americans paid on average about $2.27 per gallon for gas compared with more than $4 a gallon today.

The rest of the story is here [CNet]

According to Edmunds.com here are the ten cheapest cars to own and operate. Notice only one hybrid makes the list.

1. Chevy Aveo
   
2. Hyundai Accent
   
3. Honda Fit
   
4. Toyota Yaris
   
5. Honda Civic
   
6. Nissan Versa
   
7. Kia Rio
   
8. Mazda 3
   
9. Toyota Corolla
   
10. Honda Civic hybrid