Fuzzy’s Financial Blog

Came across an article on Kiplinger today for Best 529 College-Savings Plans. While the best time to have hopped back into your childs 529 plan if you got out would of been at the bottom of the collapse try timing that and making sure you could survive without the money. Now would be the best time to get back into a 529 plan. The market is recovering, job losses are halting and there are tax advantages to think of. The article is really good and gives a number of suggestions and includes a state by state break down of your better options.

I reviewed my 529 plans that I have and while not booming they on average have stayed positive I have 3 different 529 plans, 1 for each of my children. My best one had a return over the past 6 months of 6.3% and my worst was at 1.2% but this is money that has been set aside and well help pay for my childrens education. You should give 529 plans a look if you ahve children or are planning to have children.

Investing in a 529 plan should only happen though after you have insured that you are saving enough each paycheck for retirement, then making sure you have a 3-6 month emergency savings saved up, then that you have enough to maintain your current lifestyle. Only then should you save torwards your childs future.

If you cannot directly save for your childs education you may want to check out some of the rewards programs out there. Many of these college savings rewards programs can be used with other rewards depending on the form of shopping. UPromise is a great program, you can setup your grocery vip card in it and earn a small amount on some qualified grocery purchases automatically if the product has the UPromise seal on it, you can also register your credit cards with it and earn a percentage on restaurant visits and even online shopping purchases. The next program I like is LittleGrad this is all online shopping but it can add up also. Another primarily online shopping only program is BabyMint. Some of these programs can also be further linked with Sage Scholars which will perform a virtual match when used for a number of colleges and universities within their program, this does not only link to a few of the rewards programs but cans also be used to link 529 plan contributions and many others to it.

So even if you do not have the money you can start through a rewards program and then kick off a 529 plan when you have the money. Yet another program out there is called Earn Your Future with this program you and your family and friends can make pledges for your child based on their grades. That way your kids are taking part in their future and the harder they work the more the will have saved torwards their education.

The bottom line is that their are many programs and opportunities out there. Some of these programs requires straight up cash to start others are free. No matter which way you go start saving now, and even if you are doing a 529 plan do not forget about the free programs out there that you can use to help.  There are even some credit cards that do rewards in the form of college savings. Many of these programs can be overlapped and should to gain you maximum adavantage.

While I have tried MS Money in the past I always had issues with it and my banking institutions. I could connect to some but not others, so trying to get everything in one spot. Now it appears MS Money is going away according to Tom over at The Sun’s Financial Diary in his post Alternatives to MS Money.

In Tom’s article he mentions that with MS Money leaving the desktop software scene it only really leaves Quicken’s line of Financial software. I never did try Quicken’s desktop software but I did try their online version and found that to be good.

I have also used GnuCash, but I never really got it completely setup. I like the fact that it is free. It seems like you can do alot with it, I had just started using Yodlee Moneycenter online and was able to easily get everything setup.

One popular online service is Mint which I have tried but just did not care for as I had found Yodlee. Mint actually uses yodlee on the back end and adds what is supposed to be better user visualizations and interactions. Your decision between these too are up to you, I just find Yodlee to be much more powerful and not as diluted as Mint. Mint does have some interesting features though, like seeing if the average person around your zip code spends about the same amount of money for various items. The data used from this is pulled from other users accounts and is completely anonymous and may not be a total representation but it does give you an idea of whether our spending is inline with others.

More online tools seem to be popping up everyday, raising the risks you will find ascam site that is just looking for your information. Or that a completely legitimate site gets hacked and your information stolen. Hopefully neither of these things happen, but the chance is about the same as getting your bank hacked in my opinion as long as you stick with the more legitamate online sites.

Cruising other peoples blogs I came across this article on FSA or Flexible spending accounts. Darwin’s Finance posted the article “How FSA Plan Account Contributions Can Save You Thousands“. It is a fairly well written article and is fairly in depth. I prefer HSA’s or Health Savings Accounts which you can’t mix with an FSA. Each type has their place with advantages and disadvantages. You should give the article a good read if you are interested. I will try to do a write up concerning HSA’s which do require a HDHP (High Deductible Health Plan) Insurance plan.

Well Realty Income(O), which engages in the acquisition and ownership of commercial retail real estate properties in the United States, announced a dividend increase to $0.142375 per share from $0.1420625 per share. This is its 6th increase in the past year, and while small shows great hope for me at least.  Tom A. Lewis, Chief Executive Officer of Realty Income, commented, “We are pleased that, despite challenging economic conditions, our operations allow us to once again increase the amount of the dividend we pay to our shareholders. With the payment of the July dividend we will have made 468 consecutive monthly dividend payments.”

Realty Income calls itself “The Monthly Dividend Company(R)” and has declared 468 consecutive common stock monthly dividend payment since its inception in 1994. 2,300 retail properties under long-term lease agreements with leading regional and national chains help to support the cash flow for these monthly dividends. This dividend is currently yielding 7.70%.

Disclosure: I own shares of O.

I haven’t written in a while. Took a minor hit from the market fall. I had just hit making over $50 a month off of dividends in December and then in January I made $23. I now am back up to about $45 a month off of stock dividends. 3 of my 6 Prosper loans have defaulted and gone to collections, surprisingly it is those with the A & B credit rating that defaulted, the 3 loans to C & D credit ratings are still on time so I am making $3 a month here but I am also out around $120 from the defaulted loans. My Fynanz student college loan is still going fine with the person paying only interest which is about $1 a month. I am continuing to use Gomez Peer and I consistently have recieved at least $5 a month from sharing my computer processing time when I am not using it.

I have shutdown a number of my websites, mainly because a number of them got hacked and were not making money anyways. I still have Fuzzy gaming which while only making me a little bit of money is increasing in traffic, it uses Google Adsense($10 so far over the last year) for ads and MochiAds games for the content(only $.08 for the past 6 months).

I haven’t made any money yet with Avengerki Web Hosting. And using Domain embarking did not yield any positive return for me all though apparently others are doing pretty good with it, it all depends on your niches I believe.

On the college savings side I have earned on average $6 a month through UPromise. I have only made a total of $5 through Babymint so far. And through Littlegrad I have a total savings of $20. I know this doesn’t seem like a lot but it does help.

So all in all I am currently back to about where I was in December. Things appear to be looking up and I do have ideas for generating more income. I want to get into the photography royalties through 123rf, Crestock, Dreamstime, Fotolia, and iStock I don’t have anything on any of those sites yet but I will be taking a large number of pictures here over the next few months and hopefully I will get some put on these sites then I can start evaluating the sites and maybe making some money.

While checking the college savings programs I participate in I noticed that UPromise has come out with a new program. The are eCoupons and they get associated to your grocery store loyalty cards. What does this mean to you? Well now instead of just earning a little here and there off of your purchases you can activate the ecoupon and then purchase the item earning extra money. And the more money the better right.

AOL’s Shortcuts.com is out there for eCoupons also, currently they are only good for Kroger stores. Then there is SmartSource currently serving Golden Eagle customers. And coupons.com is currently working on an eCoupon solution along with their print coupons.

And if you have a data enabled cell phone you can use programs such as Cellfire and QPonix. These use coupon codes that you can give the cashier in certain store chains.

If you find any other programs feel free to let me know.

If you are like me and have idle gift cards lying around then you could possibly earn interest on them. A site called LeverageCard allows you to register a large number of different gift cards and you can earn either 1% or 3.65% interest a week on them.

While this may not add up to alot it is basically free money that is being earned off of the gift card until you use it, and if you actually lose the card you still have the possibility of using it online from the saved information. I have been using it for almost a year now and I am up to $8 earned over the year. Leveragecard is a great service and it is still under going further improvements. 

If you have gift cards you can’t use because you recieved it as a gift and the store is not in your area you can use the gift card swap feature. It may take some time before they match the gift card with someone who wants that card at the specific denomination. Once the gift cards are matched you simply send the card to the other person and they send you the card you want.

Any other gift card opportunities out there like LeverageCard that you know of let me know.

If you have not heard of social lending or peer to peer lending then you may be missing out on an opportunity to diversify your total investment portfolio. While there is various levels of risk in any investment lending money has its own risks and there are programs out there to help mitigate that risk and also allows you to choose your risk comfort level. These sites allow you to loan out money to people, or borrow money as the case may be, in smaller packets then loaning out the entire amount to someone.

Well what do I mean in smaller packets, well if a person is looking to borrow $5000 and all you have to risk is $100 you would put up your $100 at an apr you like and other like minded investors put up funds starting at $50 to fulfill the loan. What does this mean to you? Well for starters you are risking only what you feel you can risk and earning what can be a decent interest on the money you put forth. What it also means is if the loan goes into default you are only out a small amount as opposed to the entire $5000, and then there is the possibility of collections.

If you want to loan money and at the same time help others by funding their education then Fynanz is for you. You can get friends on their and if you loan to the student they can recieve a match of what you put up to loan them dollar for dollar. These loans are like standard student loans and can be deferred while still in school and can range from 5, 7 or 10 year loans, the interest rate will be determined by auction style bidding. You can start loaning money with as little as $50. Fynanz also will guarantee a portion of the loan depending on the borrowers credit anywhere from 50% to 100%, very handy and helps to cover your money.

Want to start seeing the money within a month then Prosper is more your style. These loans can be for pretty much any thing and are for a set three year period. This is another auction style loan place where you can bid amounts starting at $50 and the lower the interest rates are the winners. Just because you bid on a loan and it was filled does not mean that loan will actually get filled, before Prosper considers the loan valid the borrower is given the option to accept the interest rate they end up with or try and get a new loan request filled, Prosper will also go back over the loan information to ensure it is a valid loan.

There are other social lending sites out there but not all sites pay interest on your loans to you. Prosper and Fynanz are both for in the United States. There are other programs available for Europe, Australia and Asia.

So you have gotten tired of taking your film to get developed and went and bought a good digital camera. You have been using it for awhile and now your running into a different issue, you have all these photos just sitting on your hard drive collecting virtual dust. Well have you thought about trying to sell your pictures? Even if you are not a professional you may be able to sell some of your photographs as stock photos.

Stock photographs are images or pictures that are used for various things, like the image at the top of this screen. While most of these are of places and objects some pictures of people can work to. If a person is a focal point of the photograph you will need to have a model release form to try and sell the photo but most other photographs will be fine, as long as it is of high quality and at least 4 megapixels.

Where can you place your photos for possible sale? Well that is easy there are several stock photo sites available to you. You can join one or many, but if you use one exclusively you can earn more money. Some sites are more restrictive then others, some have a tougher initial submission review with easier submission review after the first. So now you may be wondering what sites are these, well here are a few Fotolia, iStockPhotos, Dreamstime, Crestock, and 123RF. 

If you don’t want to go the route of the above mentioned stock photo sites you can create your own site and sell your photographs that way, but to start you may not have as much traffic, although this does show that you are a photographer better.

And you can submit your photos to photo sharing sites and while this may not actually make you any money if you include a link to your website or photo locations letting people know that the image can be bought you can potentially make money this way to. Check out Flickr or Webshots to suit your needs.

Of course if you are good you can make money from your photography by doing portraits and this would be done offline but you can advertise online.

Do you have a hobby you make money from online please let me know I am always interested.

Don’t you wish you could make money from your computer while you sleep? Well you can now with Gomez Peer. This is a paid distributed computing software model that is testing various websites uptime. The current pay design is the following:

While the maximum payout is currently $45 that is money that your computer is earning no matter what you are doing. You can even install the software on multiple computers to insure that you make money. Be warned though you can’t have multiple accounts or you will be banned. We shall see if I make any moeny from this next month.