Filed under: Cards, Debt

The video below from BusinessWeek looks at how touchy credit card companies are getting. The slightest mistake — for instance, sending in one payment two days late — can lead to a huge increase in your interest rate. But more slimy, even making a minimum payment or showing a steady increase in your balance can you flag as a greater risk and result in a higher interest rate.

Congress is taking a look at these arbitrary and unpredictable rate hikes but, in the meantime, the ideal way to avoid being at the mercy of your creditors is to avoid being a debtor. if you find your interest rates hiking, I’d suggest taking it as a wake-up call to start paying down your debt aggressively.

I’m not defending the credit card companies: but being subject to their whims is the nature of owing them money. A pound of flesh indeed …

Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments

Share This

Share This

Filed under: Debt, Real Estate, Saving, Mortgage Confidential

Mortgage expert David Reed invites Walletpop readers to ask him questions about real estate financing. leave your questions in the comment section of this post.

Which is the better choice, a mortgage broker or a mortgage banker? First, let’s dig a tiny deeper and find out exactly what each of these terms mean.

A mortgage broker does not lend money nor make a mortgage but instead finds a mortgage from other lenders on behalf of their client, the buyer. A mortgage banker places a mortgage directly to the buyer from its own funds. Does that make the mortgage broker more costly?

No, because the mortgage broker has access to other mortgage company’s loans at a discount, mark them up to “retail” and can compete with any direct lender. Much like an independent insurance agent who shops around for the ideal deal. In fact, that’s an advantage mortgage brokers tout…having the ability to shop for the best deal. A mortgage banker can’t shop around, they use the interest rates and fees set by their company. So if the broker can shop around for the ideal deal, isn’t the broker the superior choice? Not necessarily.

Mortgage rates from one company to the next can’t be all that far apart because lenders price their 30 year fixed rate mortgage on the very same index. One lender can’t be at 5.00% while everyone else is at 5.50% for instance. There’s no secret lender who has the best mortgage rate.

Mortgage bankers have an advantage simply by having more control over the loan process. When there’s a mistake or a problem, the banker fixes it internally. When a loan goes through a mortgage broker and there’s a mistake or a problem, the problem takes longer to resolve simply because there are more channels that problem must go through. I know these things because I started out as a mortgage broker in California and am now a mortgage banker in Texas.

It used to be said that a mortgage broker can also find a lender that will make a “special” mortgage perhaps for those with damaged credit or hard to prove income. While that was the case maybe a year ago the fact is that there are very few differences in mortgages today. What a broker has, a banker has.

So which is better? Neither is superior, both have their advantages. The trick is finding a loan officer you can trust to guide you through the mortgage process at competitive rates, regardless of their moniker.

Real estate finance expert David Reed is president of CD REED Mortgage Bankers in Austin, TX and author of Mortgage Confidential: What You Need to Know That Your Lender Won’t Tell You and Mortgages 101: Swift Answers to over 250 Critical Questions About Your Home Loan.

Share This

Share This

Filed under: Internet, Social Software

As cliché as it sounds, breaking up really is hard to do. Well, maybe it’s not theoretically difficult, but telling someone you’ve cared about in any capacity that it’s over and it’s time to move on isn’t fun. Actually, being told is probably even less fun, especially if there’s the element of surprise involved.

Technology complicates things. Aside from the potential for devastation that comes from a significant other texting you a “Let’s just be friends” message, or finding a picture of your sweetie on the web in a compromising position, there’s the whole social networking issue.

ABC News takes a hard-hitting look at Facebook relationship statuses. A girlfriend is devastated when her ex- changes his status to “Single.” Was she more devastated over the break up, or the fact that several Facebook contacts gave her a ring? ABC doesn’t say for sure, but their use of the phrase “barraged with phone calls” and the statement that it was an “uncomfortable experience” for the former couple leads us to believe that, er, maybe some calls were made for less altruistic reasons than the offer of a shoulder to cry on.

The love physicians here at DLS Most of us here at Download Squad would say there are a few issues to take into account when you decide to make your relationship public on a site like Facebook. Why are you using the social networking site? Is it work or career related? Are you keeping in touch with friends? It’s ultimately up to you, and how comfortable you feel about the fact that some friends on social networks might not actually be friends (unless you really do know Tom at MySpace personally).

The sad fact is that on the ‘net as well as in real life, there are people who will gossip and ask for way too many details over a break up that they aren’t directly involved in. The interwebs makes it easier for them to poke and prod for the juicy bits, sure, but that’s less technology related and more human nature related.

And guys/girls… Seriously, don’t ever break up with anyone via text. You’ll never have a relationship in this town again with that sort of behavior.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Share This

Share This

Filed under: Internet, Web services, Social Software, web 2.0

Iterasi, a bookmarking toolbar and web service we first mentioned in January, is now expanding its private beta. If you visit the site to sign up for an account this day, there’s a good chance you’ll be let in nearly immediately. At least that was our experience. Your results may vary.

So what’s iterasi? It would be easy to dismiss the service as yet another bookmarking tool. You add a toolbar to your browser and you can tag and save pages to your account, which you can then access from any browser. But unlike similar services like del.icio.us, iterasi saves dynamic content. In other words, you can “notarize” a page like Download Squad, and the service will take a snapshot of the page as it looked the day you saved it. You can also use the service to save a copy of a custom Google Map, or take a snapshot of today’s cover of the New York Times.

And since iterasi saves a snapshot of a page and not just a link, you can actually share the page as you saw it with other users thanks to some embed code.

Iterasi currently only supports Firefox 2 and Internet Explorer 7. Firefox 3 support is coming soon.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Share This

Share This

Filed under: Internet, Productivity, Web services, Social Software, web 2.0

How many of you subscribe to an RSS feed because you liked one post you read? Raise your hands please. No, seriously, raise your hands please. Now how many of you stay subscribed to that feed because you’re either too lazy to unsubscribe, don’t know how to unsubscribe, or don’t want to hurt the bloggers’ feelings by unsubscribing? Us too.

NewsGator is coming to our rescue!

Starting today, NewsGator, NetNewsWire, and FeedDemon will begin recommending stories and feeds for you to read and subscribe to.

Using some Harry Potter magic sauce from a company called SenseArray, NewsGator will start showing showing you suggestions based on things that other people think are interesting. Hooray!

What’s the catch? Well, to make this technology smarter, you’ll have to interact with your feeds a tiny. That’s OK. We know that the earth isn’t run by Terminators machines…yet. Right now, SenseArray’s technology uses forward and share numbers, as well as tags and comment data to calculate what might interest you. You’ll be able to thumbs up and thumbs down stories to customize the experience though, so no worries. Rage against the machine, y’all!

Soon, NewsGator hopes to accurately predict your tastes, even before you know what your tastes are.

It looks like the company is also hoping to help us deal with our severe information overload (the 3% of us junkies) by letting us unsubscribe to those dormant feeds that we don’t like anymore and keep us up to date with the Right Stuff. The stuff we’ll actually, you know…read?

Oh, and no worries, it’s not just for the geeks. Their new suggestion service will cover Top News, Entertainment, Sports, Fun Stuff, Science and Technology. While we’re not sure what “Fun Stuff” actually is, we’ll wait for T2 to suggest something.

Oh and please feel free to subscribe to the Downloadsquad feed. We’re humans.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Share This

Share This

Filed under: Internet, Web services, Social Software, web 2.0

Not everyone can anticipate companies like Comcast to reach out and touch them every time they complain about poor service over Twitter. But thanks to Get Satisfaction’s new Overheard service, there’s a superior chance that you will receive a response next time you start bitching on Twitter about companies like eBay, Seesmic, or even Twitter itself.

Here’s how it works. Get Satisfaction is a community site that connects companies to customers in need of support. You could already login to Get Satisfaction and leave comments or complaints. And representatives from the companies you were speaking about can respond.

Now Get Satisfaction has launched a service called Overheard that uses Twitter search engine Summize to find out when people are talking about companies on Twitter. Those Twitter messages are posted to Get Satisfaction, an when a company employee, another customer, or anyone else responds, Get Satisfaction will send a tweet letting you know about the response.

So there’s no guarantee that someone will turn your cable Television service back on if it gets shut off inadvertently just because you begin complaining on Twitter. But now you know someone might be listening. Or you could just pick up the phone and call the customer service number. But seriously, who does that anymore?

[via VentureBeat]

Read

Share This

Share This

Filed under: World wide web, Web services, Google, Social Software, web 2.0

A few months ago, Google launched Google Sites, a hosted wiki product built on JotSpot technology. But until this week, Google Sites was only available to Google Apps users, which basically meant you needed to have your own domain name to set up a wiki. Now Google is opening Google Sites up to everyone.

If you’ve been living in a cave for the past few years, a wiki is basically a page that’s open to collaborative editing. While Google doesn’t call its new product a wiki, the service lets you create and customize pages, and share access to those pages by inviting a group of people to view and edit the content. In this way, you can plan trips, meetings, or other activities.

You can sign up by logging into Google Sites using your Google ID, or by registering for a new free account. Your page will be created at sites.google.com/sitename. If you want a custom domain, you can still sign up for the service through Google Apps.

Check out Google’s Demo video after the jump.

[via Official Google Blog]

Continue reading Google Sites expands: Anybody can create wiki-like pages

Read

Share This

Share This