I’m always looking for ways to benefit off free online service or my site, so I signed up for Triond. All I have to do is create something original (e.g. documents, pictures, or music), publish it, and then earn royalties! Doesn’t this sound easy and simple? Of course. Earning royalties is great, as it’s part of the passive income. This means that all I have to do is just publish some material and it’ll earn me X amount of money for however long Triond is around.

So how did it work out? Well, a 40% success on my initial attempt. I submitted five of my articles (Correlation Between Money and Happiness, Why Using the Debit Card is Smart, Discover Open Road vs. Citi Driver’s Edge, Yodlee.com and Mint.com) and waited to see what would happen. Surprisingly, they were all reviewed within a day and… three out of the five were rejected for being too marketing oriented and being a duplicate article on my blog. That’s OK, since my other two went undetected. But I will probably need to start creating articles specifically for Triond. That means I’ll be doing double the work!

I haven’t exactly figured out what my earnings will be because payments are sent on the 15th of each month. Triond will figure out how much my materials have earned me by using this formula: Earnings = Views of my content * (Value of my content / 1000). Value is a fixed number between $0.50 and $10.00. And, I just gave myself another view on both of my contents. Unfortunately, you aren’t paid until you make at least $50.00. That means my earnings, if under the minimum amount for payment, will just roll over to the next month, and then to the month after that, and so on.

Here are the two articles that were published

Discover Open Road vs. Citi Driver’s Edge
Correlation Between Money and Happiness

Be a friend and give me some page views!

Sunday night, I tried out Yodlee. It’s an excellent finance managing service, has a nice interface and it feels easy to use. I’m going to review this free online service and discuss its features.

Registration
It was pretty easy. Just your generic website registration process which takes just minutes to complete. After filling out the fields, click on the confirmation link inside the email you’ll receive.

Design
It’s a pretty similar interface to BofA’s My Portfolio. It’s not flashy and web 2.0 looking like Mint.com, but I like its simple layout. It’s easy to figure out where all of the features are. There are a lot of drop down menus to change the settings of what you’re looking at, which is always nice since it allows you to narrow down what kind of transaction or spending you want to review.

Features and Flexibility
You’re going to see a lot of features that are in BofA’s My Portfolio. I won’t go into detail on all of the features since you can see them on the screenshots, but instead I’ll mention extra features that makes Yodlee user-friendly.

Once you login, you’re redirected to the Accounts Overview’s Account Summary page, but Yodlee has an option to let you change it to another page. I had changed mine to the Dashboard, which is a page that shows you net worth, bill reminders, and transactions, as well as many others which I disabled through the Customer Care page.

Unlike Mint.com, I didn’t have trouble adding ING Direct as an account, and I was able to add FNBO Direct as well. Adding all nine of my accounts took me 10 minutes at the most.

A nice feature is the Yodlee FinancialCaldendar. The name is self-explanatory, the tab shows you a calendar with the days your bills are due.

Conclusion
Yodlee is My Portfolio plus extra features. The extra features aren’t something that would make me choose it over My Portfolio convincingly, but they are still nice. It’s kind of like Quicken with similar features. Like Mint, some of the transactions were mislabeled but that’s something I can’t blame on Yodlee. The labeling system is very slightly off but it’s smart enough to label all of the unknown transactions as Other Expenses, so I can go back and fix them. The rest of the transactions were accurate.

So far, I like Yodlee better than Mint so far even if Mint has a nicer layout. It’s got more features and more flexibility. I’m still going to use BofA’s My Portfolio because although Yodlee and Mint both have neat features that My Porftolio doesn’t have, but they aren’t enough to make me completely change my mind.

I recently tried out Mint.com because I wanted to take a look at this free web-based financial management service that won TechCrunch’s Best Presenting Company award. Bank of America’s My Portfolio does the exact same thing except it doesn’t have as big of a list of credit card, bank, savings, investment accounts you can choose from.

Mint is very easy to use. Registration took me less than a minute and to add my bank and credit card accounts, it took a short time as well. Although, it didn’t have FNBO Direct for me to choose from, I’m going to give it a test run and share with you guys.

Let’s start off with some screenshots:
Click for a larger image.

At first glance, you can see that Mint has a very nice interface that is user-friendly and easy on the eyes. Mint has five tabs that display your financial status and other useful information.

Overview: This tab give you how your money is allocated, your total assets, you debt, extra ways to save on your current financial situation, budget, and reminders of when and what is due. You can get a general idea of how your finances are being used from this tab alone.

Transactions: It’s self-explanatory. Here you can find all of your transactions for the past 30 days or so. This tab will give each of your account its own tab where you can take a look at which card is/was used for what. You can also edit your transactions for more accuracy.

Spending Trends: With this tab you are explained how and where you spend your money. It is pretty detailed and I found most things to be accurate. A little bit of inaccuracies in labeling some miscellaneous transactions doesn’t affect things much. You also get a pretty pie graph and some bar graphs as well for monthly spendings comparisons.

Ways to Save: This is the coolest part of Mint. I knew my Citi Diamond Preferred card wasn’t the best one for me so I had already decided on switching to Citi Driver’s Edge card before I had even heard about Mint. As soon as I finished updating my accounts, Mint recommended that I make the same decision regarding my Citi card! Pretty cool. It gave me a short detail about why I should and how much I could be saving. Excellent.

Accounts: Here is where you can add your bank and credit card accounts. The process is simple and fast. I found it to be pretty reliable. It’ll automatically alphabetize your accounts next time you visit this tab.

Overall, I like this application. It does what Quicken and MS Money can without having to purchase them. Although it’s not as powerful as those softwares are, it does give you the basic needs to manage your bank and credit card accounts. And the additional information it gives is always helpful. It may not have as much flexibility as Quicken, it’s still a pretty good application for being in its beta release.

Although I won’t be using it as my main finance manager, I don’t need to because I just use My Portfolio, and Mint won’t let you add FNBO Direct as an account, I will use it for its extra goodies.

Using Quicken can be overwhelming at first, but this is easy to get use to right off the bat. If you don’t want to be overwhelmed by the fully feature loaded softwares like Quicken, try out Mint. I like concept of this application and will be looking forward to its upgrades and improvements.

Commentary: Strangely, I haven’t run into the issues the blogger at SavingWithMe.com has. Maybe he’ll have better luck with Mint’s final release.

I read other money blogs daily. I have a bunch of them on RSS feed and I’m now I browse CNN and MSNBC’s personal finance sections as well. Strangely enough, I tend to think that most of the information is useless to me because retirement plans like a 401(k), or investing in the new rising Chinese stocks has no relevance to my financial situation in life. My hourly wage job doesn’t give me a retirement plan and I don’t even make enough spare money to invest!

Blogs that post their income, net worth, debt, and other financial aspects, like rolleyes, are more enjoyable - all of those figures are great eye candy to look at. Looking at statistics is almost always more interesting than reading a few paragraphs. But, look at these blogs:

Boston Gal’s Open Wallet
My Open Wallet
Lazy Man and Money

These people’s worth, their NET worth, is over hundreds of thousands of dollars - well ahead of my point in my journey to becoming wealthy. I’m not even a thousandaire. In fact, I’m a negative hundredaire. How do reading these blogs really help us now? I mean no disrespect to any of these bloggers and their information is real and useful to a certain group of people, but most people aren’t at their stage, nor will ever be. A lot of the information provided on these blogs are for people on their financial level. But people who regularly read up on these money blogs are probably just as non-wealthy as I am. In most cases, applying Boston Gal’s knowledge doesn’t help us yet. Hers and others’ assets and goals are unrealistic to the rest of us, who barely make over the poverty line.

How does any of that apply to me? It really doesn’t, but here are a couple of blogs that are more in my range.

Blogging Away Debt
Clever Dude

Now, these people, they are in debt hell and making barely any money. Their experiences with saving money is more appropriate for us. They fit our lifestyle because our definition of living frugally is different than theirs (those hundred thousandaires!). Man, I don’t care about how much these rich bloggers are trying to add on to their giant nest egg, or how little debt they have. Clever Dude and Blogging Away Debt are websites by real people. They might have ordinary lives like us, so their personal finance experiences and developments are more valuable. We are like them, when they make a mistake and make a post to warn others, or when they discover a great way to save or invest, we need to take notice.

For now, at least. When we’re making a megaton of money and got even more saved up earning 8% interest, then we’ll move on up to the big boys. But for now, I’ll stick to the little league