Cohenville

An interesting post at Dogberry Patch on using 0% credit card balance transfer offers to make easy money. The idea is based off a post at FatWallet.com. The gist of it is borrowing a certain amount of money on credit cards that offer sign up bonuses and 12 month (or more) interest free payback offers. Lets say you run up $100,000 worth of credit card loans. Well, if you just put that in a high interest savings account like ING or Citibank you can make ~$5000 in a year with no risk. Simply withdraw and repay the credit cards before the 12 months. And there are many ways to get additional rebates and loans too. Sounds like an interesting idea – the biggest worry being the impact on your credit score.

Source: Dogberry Patch

Google Maps has recently added a “Traffic” label to their maps that provides a simple red, yellow, or green color on major roads to let you know how your commute will be. I would imagine they will roll it out to less traveled roads and more major cities over time, but for now they at least cover major highways in the Washington, DC area (and others).

Source: Google Blog

I have started loaning money at prosper.com recently, trying to increase my personal returns on relatively safe investments. I have stuck to A and AA credit ratings (prosper.com ratings), but it’s always good to know what rates individual loans with specific credit ratings and debt/income ratios have been executed at. Historical data will help you better predict what interest rate you need to bid in order to win the loan. Now rateladder.com has a Loan Rate Analyzer to help you do just that.

Source: Lazy Man and Money

TiVo has just released version TiVo Desktop 2.4b. What’s new? Well you can now take programs that are on your portable media player and push them back to your TV.   Notable new features include the ability to broadcast “HD” photographs (1280×720) from comptuer to Series3 TiVo (doesn’t help me any) and the ability to transcode several video formats (other than DivX) for transfer to and playback on Series2 units. A less glamorous, but useful, feature allows the software to map beyond the default TiVo folder.

Source: Zatz Not Funny

No special write up here, I found this post on Digg that had 500 great pictures. Check it out. The site points to mirrors because it has been killed with bandwidth after being highlighted on Digg.

Good post at Lifehacker (again) under Alpha Geek on how to back up DVDs to your iPod, Zune, or other portable media player. Good instructions, descriptions and links that will get you going. What you need to 1) extract the information from the dvd, and convert those files to the format you need. It’s not as simple as DVDShrink, but it’s not that bad.

Source: Lifehacker

I recently came across PFBlogs.org, a website that aggregates many different personal finance blogs. Not only does it provide a lot of good information, but it gives me a list of personal finance blogs that I can additionally explore.

Are you going on vacation anytime soon? Do you prefer self-guided tours using public transportation instead of tour buses? Well Amadeus.net will help you find your way around. They have published printable subway maps from around the world. Now you can plan your intracity travels in advance and be ready to hit the subway in any major city around the world.

Source: Lifehacker

There have been a number of posts across numerous personal financial blogs about online brokerages offering free online trades. Online start up zecco.com announced it, Bank of America followed suit and then Wells Fargo did as well (actually, I don’t know the order). Of course, there is a catch. For example, with Wells Fargo and Bank of America, you need combined assets of $25,000 or more. This works great for me because my mortgage is through Wells Fargo, so I might just have to check it out.

Living the Dream recently posted a good explanation of these offers.

I recent read a good series of posts from PFBlog entitled Reengineering my Portfolio Management. It’s a six part series where the writer explains what he has done wrong, and defines his new approach to managing his portfolio of investments. He shares some good insight and explanations, and may have a good tip or two in your own investment approach.

From PFBlog