When it comes to protecting your privacy online, nothing is more important than a good browser data clearing tool. Deleting your cookies through a web browser’s interface hasn’t been good enough for a long time.

Fortunately, utilities like CCleaner and Glary Utilities as well as Firefox add-ons and Chrome extensions fill the need to completely clear your private data from browser cache, flash cookies, and so on.

What we need now is a way to manually and selectively protect certain cookies from cleaning.

A lot of banks and financial institutions are requiring users to take an extra step when accessing their account information from a new computer that has never accessed the site before. For example, Chase Bank, which handles the Amazon Rewards Visa Card, requires users to get an authentication code via text message or email to one of the numbers or addresses on record with the account in order to log in from a new computer.

Bank Login Register Computer First

Online banking customers at ING have to answer one or more of their extra security questions in order to access their high-interest online savings account or online checking account.

This extra layer of security helps prevent hackers from gaining access to your account even if they have your username and password. That makes this extra security precaution a welcome addition for most users.

However, neither banking customers nor credit card companies are interested in making it harder to manage your finances online. After successfully completing the extra security checks, users can "register" the computer that they are using so that they do not have to go through the additional security levels the next time they access the website. This registration occurs by the website placing a cookie on the computer that is used to validate the machine during future login attempts.

Unfortunately, these cookies, like all others, are wiped clean by the best privacy tools resulting in the user having to go through the whole process again.

There are ways around the issue. Everything from creating a separate profile or using a different browser to access financial data can work, but they represent an unnecessary extra step when all you want to do is check your checking balance to ensure that you don’t end up with any high overdraft protection fees from your debit card.

A better solution would be for developers to incorporate a vault or protect option in their products whereby a user could manually protect specific cookies through the program interface. To protect abuse, cookies should not be allowed to be added programmatically, or via API, or clicking on a web-based button or JavaScript.

The first solid privacy utility available with a cookie protection feature will be my new top choice for protecting private data online.

Lot of people have been getting notifications from their bank or credit union about overdraft protection for debit cards. These notifications sound urgent and tell you that unless you respond that your financial institution will have to turn off overdraft protection on your debit card soon. While it sounds like your bank is trying to take care of you, the opposite is likely true.

Debit Card Overdraft Protection

You may be aware that recent banking reform legislation shut down some of the worst abuses that banks and credit unions used to generate big fee income at the expense of their customers. One of those banking abuses was so-called overdraft protection, which in reality is just a way to charge you big fee.

When you write a check, that check gets sent to your bank. Your bank pays the amount on the check out of funds in your checking account. Overdraft protection turns on when you don’t have enough money in your checking account for the check to clear. Most people assume that if there is not enough money in their account to pay a check they wrote that the check bounces, but not if there is overdraft protection.

The way overdraft protection works is that instead of returning the check you wrote for insufficient funds, your bank pays the check, and gives you a negative checking account balance. If this were free, or even reasonably priced, then you would say thank you and be grateful that your bank takes such good care of you. Unfortunately, this is not the case.

Instead, your bank charges you a fee for using the overdraft protection "service". That fee is often just as high as the fee charged for bouncing a check. The bank gets to collect a big fat fee. The only thing the customer gets out of it is that you don’t have to deal with the merchant you wrote the check to and pay any bounced check fees from them. Reasonable people can disagree on whether or not that is a service worthy of the fee charged for it.

When it comes to debit cards, however, overdraft protection is almost always a scam.

Normally, when you try and use your debit card to pay for something and you do not have enough money in your linked checking account, the transaction is declined. The cashier hands you back the card, and most people use a different card instead. Then, you would know that there is an issue that you need to check into right away. While potentially embarrassing, this situation is free, and there is no financial harm to you.

When your debit card has overdraft protection, then your bank MAY approve the transaction even if you don’t have enough money in your checking account. Of course, for using the overdraft protection service they charge you a $35 overdraft protection fee, and you never have any idea that there was a problem. In fact, you might go on to use your card four or five more times that day, and each time you will be charged another $35 fee. You could rack up over $100 in fees easily thanks to your bank’s "service."

Imagine that you don’t realize that your paycheck didn’t direct deposit on the day you thought it would. You use your debit card to buy lunch for $10, pay for some books $15, and then rent a few movies at Redbox $3. You spent $28 for day, except you actually ended up spending $118 for the day because you are nailed for three overdraft protection fees of $30 each.

In a world where most people have more than one way to pay, it is slimy and underhanded for banks to pretend that they are doing you a favor by charging you $30, $40, or even $50 to approve a transaction on your debit card. What is worse, is that nobody ever explains this to you, AND, they enroll you in this money draining "service" automatically when you sign up. Sure, it is "disclosed" to you, in the 30 pages of fine print you get with your account.

You can see why Congress tried to ban this behavior. Powerful banking lobbyists succeeded in getting the rule watered down, but now you have to "opt-in" to overdraft protection on your debit card. That is why all of those notices have started showing up.

Unless you have no other credit cards or debit cards and never carry cash, DO NOT opt-in to overdraft protection on your debit card. Just use another means of payment if your card is ever declined. You’ll save lots of money.

Refinancing a mortgage or getting a new mortgage isn’t necessarily just about finding the lowest interest rate.  But, you definitely want to know what interest rates are in general when shopping around for a mortgage.  That way, you know who is way out of the ballpark, and who is worth looking into a little bit further.

One of the best tools around for information on current interest rates is a website called Bankrate.  Bankrate.com publishes a survey of national mortgage interest rates every Tuesday morning.  Even more useful, is a weekly expert analysis of mortgage rates.  This analysis can include everything from whether or not they think rates will be going up or down in the near future, to commentary on what happened last week and what affect it had on mortgage rates for the current week.

This information can be a simple way to get a handle on financial news that you may have missed or not fully understood from the week before.  For example, whether or not a scary unemployment number you heard about the last week affects mortgage rates or not is the kind of thing that you’ll find explained in the analysis.

Using Bankrate

No tool covers every single thing you need to know, and Bankrate is no exception.  However, when used properly, Bankrate can be the best starting place for your mortgage research.

1. Check the Weekly Mortgage Rate – There is a big blue box prominently displayed on the Mortgage page.  That is the “National Overnight Averages”.  While useful, that survey is subject to more fluctuation.  Find the Mortgage Rate Trend Index.  It will be a regular link in the “news” area.  It comes out on Thursdays, so if you are on the site on Tuesday or Wednesday it might not be on the front page anymore.
2. Read the Analysis – Don’t just look at the numbers, read the analysis.  This will give you an idea of what to expect.  Remember, this is last week’s data, so the numbers you hear this week will be different.
3. Jot Down the Rates for Your Mortgage – There will be a lot of numbers.  You don’t need them all.  If you are looking for a 30-year fixed mortgage, the rate on the 15-year mortgage is irrelevant.

The Next Step

The next step is to start shopping around.  We’ll discuss that in an upcoming post.  Subscribe to the Finance Gourmet Feed to make sure you don’t miss anything.

The much ballyhooed law passed a few years ago that was supposed to address all the privacy concerns out there regarding banks, brokerages, utilities, mortgage companies, and other companies that you do business with requires that all companies send you a privacy notice at least once per year.  In that privacy notice you mush be given the right to opt out of certain kinds of information sharing between subsidiaries, and even information being shared with other unrelated companies. 

Legally Required Annual Privacy Notice

Don’t remember seeing any of those?

That is no coincidence.  Jammed into the same envelope as your year end statement and/or certain tax forms will be a very plain looking piece of paper printed with dense black and white text.  Unlike the piles of glossy full-color materials you get in those envelopes year round, this one is designed to NOT be read.  The plain text and simple font will make you assume that it isn’t something that you care about, just more legal mubmo-jumbo from the bank.  And that, of course, is exactly what the companies are hoping for.

You see, tucked somewhere in that boring piece of “junk” that you throw in the recycle bin without a second thought are all the ways those companies collect private information about you, and what they do with it.  For some, it is exactly what you think it should be.  The bank has your name, address, and phone number because it has to communicate with you and they don’t share or sell that information with anyone else.  But, some of them would shock you.

There are plenty of banks, brokerages, and credit card companies whose privacy statement says that not only do they collect way more information about you than you might be comfortable with, but that they share that information with every other business unit, subsidiary, and parent company even remotely associated.  Even worse, many of them will flat out state that they routinely disclose that information to unrelated third-parties without your consent and without notifying you.

How can they get away with that?

You didn’t read yours did you?  Do you think anyone else read theirs?

Even if you do read it, opting out is not made easy.  For companies that bend over backwards for you to sign up for online statements and access, they seem surprisingly uninterested in you being able to go online to opt out of having every detail of your personal information being sold to anyone and everyone.  Instead, you’ll have to fill out a form in pen and paper and send it back to them.  Is there an envelope included?

You must be joking.  Just finding the right address can be a chore.

Still in this day and age of rampant identity theft and computer break-ins (and based on my mail an alarming number of lost and stolen corporate laptops), the fewer places that have your personal information the better. 

So, gather up your mail as it comes in and look for the words “Privacy Notice” or “Privacy Update” or something like that.  Put them all in a basket somewhere and then one day, sit down and go through them one at a time and opt out of every single one.  Don’t assume that a big brand name bank isn’t engaged in these kinds of tricks because they are just as much as that fly-by-night mortgage broker who sold you that negative amortization adjustable rate mortgage a few years ago.

Spread the word to your friends and family.  Maybe if enough people opted out and spoke of their outrage companies would change their behavior.  But that day is far in the future, because for now, most people just throw their privacy in the trash.

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I was going through my stack of mail to look at (separate from the stack that has things that actually need taken care of) and came across an offer for Fidelity’s mySmart Cash Account.  Intrigued, I decided to take a look at the Fidelity checking account that they were so proud of that they included a glossy little flier to advertise it.  The result?  What the—?

Regular Bank Checking Sucks This Bad?

The Fidelity myCash account boasts exactly two features that do not count as minimum basic features for a checking account.  First, it pays interest.  How much interest?  Well, this is where Fidelity gets a little weasel-ish.  The flyer says that I will “Earn three times the national average…”  Um, OK.  How much is that?  Folks, it isn’t even in the fine print, that’s how much the rate must be worth!

A visit to Fidelity’s website reveals the depressing answer.  A balance of less than $5,000 in a myCash checking account will earn a whopping 0.20% APR.  Whoo hoo!  But wait!  Maybe if you have over $5,000 it is worthwhile?  Survey says? 0.20% again.  Yes, go through all of the steps and take the time to open a Fidelity mySmart Cash Account, and you too can earn a whole 0.20% interest.

Ironically, you can actually earn something in the neighborhood of 2% by using a money market fund, but when you are pandering to the fear of the people who can’t be bothered to read anything more than headlines by really pushing the whole FDIC insurance thing, you can’t switch gears and point out the much better rate that you can get in what is still a pretty safe account.

Oh, the other value added feature is unlimited ATM fee refunds.  That is nice, but hardly a huge deal anymore if you know what you are doing.  In other words, the Fidelity cash account is good enough, but nothing better.

This leads to the inevitable question.  Are regular bank checking accounts so bad now that this counts as a great deal, or is Fidelity just dutifully pushing another product in an effort to meet a marketing projection or to make their services more “sticky”?

Credit Union Free Checking Accounts

The reason I’ll have to do some research is that I have had my checking at my local credit union for many years, so I honestly have no idea what kind of shenanigans banks are pulling these days.  The free checking account at my credit union offers:

• FREE Online Bill Pay
• FREE Downloads into Quicken® and Microsoft® Money
• FREE Online Check Images
• UNLIMITED ATM withdrawals without any credit union fees (though they do not refund the fees charged by the ATMs)
• UNLIMITED check writing
• A FREE Visa Check Card
• No Minimum Balance
• No Monthly Fees
• No Annual Account Fees

Granted there is no interest paid on this account.  They do have an interest bearing checking account if you have a certain minimum balance.  It pays 0.15% starting at under $2,500 and by $5,000 it pays either 0.25% or 0.50% depending upon which version you have.  Guess there is no reason to try out that Fidelity cash management checking account thing after all.

Bummer.

When considering refinancing your home mortgage, the first step is to get all of the details on what you have now.  Sure, you have vague numbers in your head, but that won’t help you answer all of the loan application questions, or make a real hard-numbers based calculation about the value of refinancing.  What exactly do you need to know before you dive into looking for low interest rates and refinancing your mortgage?

Required Information Before Researching Interest Rates and Refinancing

• Current Balance of Home’s First Mortgage – Not a ballpark, an exact number according to your last statement.
• Current Balance of Home’s Second Mortgage or HELOC – Again, the number from the last statement.
• Current Interest Rate – What are you paying on your mortgage right now?
• ARM or Adjustable Interest Rate Features – When does your rate go up? (The actual date, not just the year.)  How much can it go up in the first year?  The second year?  Each year after that?  Is there a floor (minimum)?  Is there a ceiling (maximum)?
• When Did Your Mortgage Start? – What day did you close on?
• Current Home Value? – Check Zillow and Trulia to get a ballpark.  Print those pages out so you have them for reference.  Keep in mind that these values are based on public information at your county’s records office, so they won’t include any improvements you have made to the house.  Don’t worry about it too much unless it was something major.  This is just for your calculations not for the application yet.
• Credit Score? – If you don’t know, call your banks first and see if one of them will tell you what it is.  Make sure they tell you the date it is from too.  Many banks and credit unions will get your credit score on a regular basis both to keep your records up to date and to be able to offer you services you might qualify for.  So, a teller or loan officer might just be able to pull it up for you as a courtesy.  If not, put looking into a better bank on your to-do list.

Ok, now you are ready to get started with some research.  Having this information up front will not only make your research easier but also more accurate.  It is a huge let down to do a bunch of research based on “remembering” that you mortgage balance is $315,000 when it is actually $350,000, only to find out you will have to start over with the real numbers, or worse, just go with the wrong research because you don’t want to start over.

One important thing to remember is the limit for Jumbo mortgages.  Right now, this number is $415,000 in many places, but that number is adjusted based on where you live and the cost of homes there.  For example, this number will be much higher in San Francisco. It is important to know this number for your area because the rules change if you are getting a jumbo mortgage versus a regular mortgage.

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Ok, it’s time to look at refinancing the old homestead’s mortgage.  I’ve been putting it off because of holidays and the fact that rates can still go lower even though the Fed recently cut rates to zero.  Now, it’s time to take a serious look at refinancing and how it might work out for my family.  I’ll be posting a series of articles here on Finance Gourmet to help guide you through the process.  By writing these articles in “real time” with my refinance adventure, you can see the whole process from A to Z and use it as a guide for your own refinancing now, and in the future.

To make sure you don’t miss out, I recommend grabbing the RSS feed.  If you aren’t familiar with RSS or “feeds”, they are basically a way to get the article pulled from here by a RSS reader which is just software that goes and gets articles from the websites you ask it to watch.  That way, you don’t have to remember to open your bookmarks to get back here.  It is kind of like the old idea of subscribing to emails that updated you on website content, but this way, all of your articles are kept separate and your inbox does get filled up with article postings from a bunch of web sites.

If you have never used RSS feeds before and you have a Google account, you can just use Google’s feed reader.  That way, you don’t have to install any software, and if you decide to junk the whole thing, you can just delete your feed reader subscriptions and you’re done.

Days like yesterday and today are why I write the Finance Gourmet.  For those of you who didn’t see it, the Federal Reserve, or Fed cut interest rates to between 0% and 0.25%.  All day today, the media has been droning on about what it means for consumers, homeowners, and the economy.  Unfortunately, they are in such a hurry to do so, that they skip over all the details.  So, here it is, what the Fed’s rate cut means to you.

• Interest Rates – Overall, short-term interest rates should fall in response to the Fed’s move.  Pay special attention to that important detail.  The monetary policy set by the Federal Reserve directly affects only short-term interest rates.  Long-term interest rates are set by the markets and the markets don’t always care what the Fed does, because the markets are not interested in what the interest rates are today, they care about what they will be in the future.
• Mortgages – Mortgages are long-term loans and as such, their rates follow long-term interest rates, in particular, the 10-year treasury. If you read the Interest Rates section above closely enough, you know why this is a big deal.  Just because the Fed cut rates, does not mean that mortgage rates are going down.  (See the next point).
• ARM or Adjustable Rate Mortgages – The entire purpose of adjustable rate mortgages or ARMs is to eliminate the long-term nature of a mortgage’s interest rate.  By adjusting the interest rate at regular intervals, the lender has no risk of locking in dollars at a rate lower than current rates.  The flip side of this equation can be the lowering of the mortgage rate as well, but many mortgages have language limiting the amount this can drop.
• Home Equity Line of Credit – Also known as HELOCs and not to be confused with home equity loans (which are usually fixed interest rate) these are the loans that are most likely to be affected by the Fed’s move.  Many of these loans have an adjustable interest rate set at PRIME + some percentage.  Borrowers with this type of loan may see some relief, however some of these loans have minimum rates as well.
• Credit Cards – This one is pretty much wishful thinking.  Most credit card interest rates are “fixed” because the credit card company can actually change the interest rate any time it wants to.  This is one of the most unfair practices in the credit card industry, but until the politicians in Washington make them change how they do business, don’t expect any changes.  If you happen to have a credit card with a PRIME + something rate, there may be a change, but virtually all credit card accounts have a minimum, or floor, interest rate, which has probably already been hit, so your rate isn’t going down.

What To Do Now That Interest Rates Have Been Cut

After reading the above, you should be aware that there are no quick and easy, or automatic solutions coming based on this rate cut.  Frankly, that isn’t really what it is supposed to do.  But, that doesn’t mean there is nothing you can do.

First, don’t count on the rate cut to change the interest rates on any of your current accounts.  Instead, check now, and keep checking to see if you can get a new account with a better rate.  If so, then applying for that new account may make sense.  Feel free to call your current lender and see if they will lower your rate, but don’t hold your breath.  Things have changed from a couple of years ago when saying “boo” to your lender got them to change the rate.

Second, if you do have an adjustable rate mortgage or HELOC, now is the time to pull out the documents you got at your closing and find out what your minimum rate is, and the day on which the rate is set, and the date on which the rate is changed (they most likely will not be the same.)  This way, you will know what to expect.  Most interest rates are reset based upon the Wall Street Journal published Prime interest rate on a certain day.  So, your mortgage may set the rate on the 1st Monday of the quarter, or the first Monday of the year, or whatever.  Since the cut came in December, it is possible that your rate will change if it is measured in January.  However, if you rate was measured before December 15, for an adjustment to occur on January 1, you just go screwed.  Make sure to keep looking around for better rates.

Third, if you have a fixed home equity loan (or a HELCO with a high floor interest rate), now is the time to check around on HELOCs.  Assuming you can get a much better rate and no (or very low) closing costs, it might make sense for you to roll over your home equity loan.  You can always go back to a fixed rate product when interest rates start rising again.  They didn’t come all the way down to zero all at once, and they won’t go all the way back up to 5% all at once either.  In the meantime, it might save you a good chunk of change.

Lastly, do not cancel credit cards (unless they have an annual fee, and then cancel them now) until you have replacements in hand.  With the current environment, banks and lenders are not necessarily making intelligent decisions and you may find it difficult to get new cards even with pristine credit and good ratios.  So, get new ones first, then cancel the old ones.

Most importantly, don’t get sucked up in the media hype.  The sky is not falling.  Things will come around again, they always do.  Do not listen to comparisons to the Great Depression.  The Great Depression not only had a stock market crash, but bread lines, and scores of bank failures.  The entire number of bank failures in 2008 still does not compare to the number of bank failures during the Great Depression, and unlike then, not a single account holder has lost a single cent.  This is not the same as then. That doesn’t mean there won’t be something new and bad that happens, but you can bank on the fact that it won’t be the same.

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Ok, I get asked all the time about where to get the best rates for a savings account.  First off, you want a money market account, not a savings account.   Money market accounts pay better rates in exchange for restrictions that should be very easy for you to meet.

The Online Banks

Next, if you are purely interested in rates, then online banks are the way to go.  There is a catch, but it isn’t what you think.  99% of the online banks you will find through a reputable source are backed by real banks with real assets offering better rates in exchange for not having to hire tellers to process your transactions.  The catch is that you probably still need a regular local bank of some sort to handle certain things.  The time it takes to transfer money from your local bank to your online bank is usually 3 or 4 business days, so we are not talking about instant access to your cash.  However, many online accounts come with ATM cards, so if you just need $40 for gas, no problem, but if you need $800 to cover your mortgage payment, then you’ll need to plan ahead.

If you haven’t shopped for savings rates in a while, you might be in for a little shock.  As you may have noticed, the Fed has been slashing interest rates in an effort to prop up the sluggish economy.  That means loan rates are down (good news), but so are savings rates (bad news).  Right now, you’ll be looking at mid 3% for the highest yeilding accounts and closer to 3% for your more standard accounts.  As always, you can get higher rates with higher balances.

The best place to find online savings rates is at Bankrate.com.  If you aren’t familar with Bankrate, you probably should be.  Overall, it is a pretty honest site without too much flash or smoke.  Yes, there are ads, but they tend to be non-intrusive.  Skip the articles or whatever on the front page and click to go right to what you are looking for whether it is home equity loans, car loans, or bank rates.  Don’t take these rates as the gospell, but they will give you a solid ballpark of what you are going to be looking at when you are ready to move forward.  For example, if you want to refinance your house with a 5.0% loan and the best 30 year fixed loan on Bankrate is 6.125% then you are not going to find a 5.0% loan without some nasty hidden tricks.

Click here to access the High Yield Money Market and Savings Account Rates.  Choose the minimum balance you are looking at and click next.  On this page, click the circle under “Rate After Intro”.  You aren’t some sucker who is going to get all dazzled by a high rate for 3 or 6 months.  You are a savvy customer who wants the goods, not the gimmicks.   Again, don’t take this chart as set in stone.  Use it as a place to start your research.

The Fine Print

Watch out for the fine print.  Most commonly you’ll find things like being required to also have a checking account, or being required to have a direct deposit.  Before you sign up make sure that all the fine print and monthly fees makes sense for you.

The No Research Route

If you don’t want to mess with research, open an INGDirect account.  They probably don’t have the highest rate, but they are a solid respected financial services company and they don’t have any tricks or gimmicks.  They offer a really nice online interface, and if you want to use their online checking (not required) you can link your accounts and move money between them instantly.

Remember, don’t fall for intro rates, and read all the terms and conditions.  It might sound like legal mumbo jumbo, but somewhere in there you will clearly understand if you are required to have direct deposit or make 3 ATM withdrawals per month.  Whatever account you choose, be sure it fits how you use your money.

Not too long ago, I wrote about monitoring your credit report on the non-blog Finance Gourmet site.  In it I included a warning about the various services offering to “fix” your credit and lower you monthly payment.  Now a much bigger site has an “insider” confession from just such an outfit.  A little independent confirmation always is good.