Websites & Tools

The past year and a half, I've met many interesting young professionals online and offline through this blog and my other related activities. For my own benefit and yours I've started a new site to keep track of what young professional related blogs are doing and saying right now-- The Young Professional Blog Aggregator.

In less than a week of being online ypblogs.com has over 400 posts available from 25 blogs!

Every 10 minutes ypblogs.com scans numerous young professional related blogs for updated articles. When a new article is posted on a site its title and a small description (just the first couple lines of the article) are posted right on the front page of ypblogs.com in reverse chronological order (newest article listed first).

Readers can visit ypblogs.com or subscribe in their RSS reader to monitor what the young professional blog-o-sphere is writing about. The article titles link directly to the original blog article where users can read the full article, comment, discuss, etc.

Writers can add their blog to ypblogs.com to gain new readership, market their blog, increase their page rank, and become even closer knit to the young professional community. The site is open to both young professional writers as well as those writing on topics that would be of interest to young professionals. It's important to realize that the definition of who is a young professional isn't set in stone and information by writers who may be "less young" can still be very valid for those who are "more young".

ypblogs.com is already gaining great momentum. It's been up less than a week and right now there are 25 blogs that have signed up and 413 posts are listed. There are no ads, only legitimate blogs, and a graphical list of popular tags on the sidebar showing what the young professional blogging community is writing about most right now.

It's really a win-win situation for both readers and writers. Not to mention the fact that now I can even use my own new site to read more of what my fellow young professionals are writing.

Read articles at right now, add your young professional blog, or subscribe via RSS.

About 2 months ago I set up a brokerage account with Fidelity for a new Roth IRA. An unexpected benefit was access to their Full View service (powered by Yodlee) which allows you to see information about nearly all your financial accounts (Fidelity and non-Fidelity) in one place. I was pleased to see I could access more of my accounts with more reliability than I could with Mint-- including bank accounts, stock accounts, student loans, and credit cards.

It seems like every year I have another account or two in the mix of everything and it only gets harder and harder to keep track of it all. Full View shows me current balances of all my accounts, estimating my current net worth automatically, and also shows recent activity and details of each depending on how you choose to lay it all out. I can also see due dates and percentage rates for credit cards.

I did have a case where one of my accounts would not work with the service. It's a local credit union that isn't known for their great online service (I'm in the process of moving my checking account from them to ING Electric Orange anyway), but Full View allowed me to add a Custom Account where I can at least manually input numbers so they get accounted for in the Net Worth amount.

Downsides?

Occasionally, one of my accounts will not update. This has happened twice. Once, it was because the credit card site was requiring me to manually login and confirm my secret questions and answers. Another time, it simply wasn't working and after emailing Fidelity service, they responded saying a 3rd party was working to correct the problem and they did within a day or two.

Another downside is not all assets can be accounted for in my net worth calculation. For example, if I choose to count the street price of my vehicle there's no where to put it. Or, more importantly, if I want to count the expected tax burden of my traditional IRA as a liability there's no way to account for that either.

Conclusion

Fidelity's Full View service is a great utility. If Fidelity is the right broker for you, this is a bonus that makes it an even better deal.

My friend William sent me a link to a Bi-Weekly Payment Mortgage Calculator. It will help you determine how much money you'll save in interest over the life of your loan since principal is paid-off faster and interest is accumulated slower.

He writes:

"Never thought about this... Paying your mortgage bi weekly as opposed to monthly can save you lots of money over the course of the loan. This of course depends on any charges you have to pay to make the payments etc, but worth looking into i suppose.

I agree. I've known people who made bi-weekly mortgage payments and succeeded in paying much less interest. It's important to make sure you aren't paying penalty fees for early payments, though.