It’s been 26 days since my last post. As I expected, my financial situation has taken a plunge.

The total bill for the car repairs cost $1,360. That totally puts me in a place where I’m no longer keeping the $5,600 of assets. After this bill, I was definitely in the negatives for my net worth. After reallocating large chunks of my savings, I decided to pay this off completely after charging it on my Citi Driver’s Edge card for some rebates. And then I paid off my Citi Diamond Preferred card as well. That much amount of debt for me right now is not fun to look at. Now I only have three credit cards that carry a balance: my Am Ex Sky Blue, Citi Driver’s Edge, and BofA’s World Points (MBNA).
Because I paid off two credit card debts all at once, my emergency savings account is sitting at an ugly pitiful $755. I am at less than 10% of my goal now. Sigh.

Speaking of my savings account and as ratna commented on my previous post, FNBO kicked their rates down to an incredibly sad 4.3%. The fed rates getting cut is always a bad thing for online savings accounts. Surprisingly, Savings Square is still riding high at 4.80%. Maybe I should just join them. Here’s an updated list:

ING Direct is so pathetic. They chop down their rates more and faster than any online savings accounts out there. I’m surprised WaMu hasn’t made a cut since November. Impressive. I’ve tried to register an account with them online but it’s been freaking impossible because their system won’t recognize my information. Maybe I’ll try going into the branch next time. In other news, I’ve been using my Am Ex Sky Blue credit card for everything and it’s been working out great. I’m racking up points like crazy. I’ll be going away on a vacation soon. But probably later.

Uh, oh. As the title of the article says, federal fund rate was cut a quarter point. I finally noticed a new APY rate when I checked my ING Direct account yesterday.

What a surprise. ING Direct has been known to drop its rates like no other and after federal rates were cut .25%, ING Direct’s Orange Savings account is now at 4.1% APY. Does this matter to me even though I don’t use ING’s account except to earn referral bonuses? Well, not really but knowing that a big company like ING is dropping rates so quickly is unfortunate. Who knows which online bank is going to do the same next time?

FNBO Direct, the online savings account I use, is still above the 5% APY category. FNBO did drop .2% a while back during September but it’s certainly been more consistent than ING has. My previous article about the best online savings account with $1 to open needs to be updated since many of them have different rates now. UFB is down to 5.22%, Savings Square is at 5.00% and iGoBanking is at 4.9%. It seems that UFB did the best to manage (out of the banks that lowered their rates) with the new federal rates by only decreasing their original APY % by .9%. Anything above 5.0% for an online savings account is still pretty nowadays.

Couple of months ago, I got oil change done at Jiffy Lube for the second time in seven months. I somehow folded under ignorance and pressure and got upsold into purchasing a $40 more expensive oil change last time. I feel retarded. I am never going back there again for anything.

This happened in an area where I’m originally from. Although I haven’t been to any of those Jiffy Lube’s, this is still obviously infuriating because I went to one here! There’s no way for me to find out whether or not I got scammed, but I bet I did when I got the super high tech synthetic ultra premium oil. I’m pissed, but I must let it go and learn from my stupid mistakes.Also, the idiot serviceman who drove my car in left is stupid safety glasses in it, but forgot to take it out. So I have them now. Ah ha! I guess we know who had the real last word now.

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.