(From Facebook group discussion)

While Ebay does have its horror stories and scams.. let us not forget the perks of Ebay.. NY Times Damon Darlin wrote an article (“Buying Used Just Could Turn Out to Be the Next New Thing” ) that proclaimed buying used goods is the key to saving money.
“In a host of categories, from books to compact discs to cars, it doesn’t make sense to buy new anymore. Now, there are robust marketplaces for used products, which are just as good and significantly cheaper. New technologies make it easier for shoppers to compare prices from a large number of sellers.”

It’s summertime!… the perfect time to clean out your closet and gather up all the things you know are worth a lot (might even still have the tags on it if you’re anything like me) but you can’t bring yourself to throw away. Well now you won’t feel so guilty if you register for an ebay account and price your prized possessions out to anyone interested.
And on the other side.. buying off of ebay! While I admit it can often result in addiction and an ultimate shopping spree for things you do not need… it does work out when handled with caution. You’d be surprised.. there is usually someone out there trying to sell the same thing you want to buy so always check ebay before making a purchase anywhere else. Two words of advice to all girls – vintage bags! Definitely give it a try everyone!

I just finished reading an article about how the Boys and Girls Club got together to teach young kids the value of money. Hmmm.. I thought this was an interesting article considering a lot of students begin feeling financial pressures in college and after graduation.. Perhaps teaching them these ideas young will better prepare students to start saving from the beginning -

“The crew consisted of around 100, 6- to 8-year-olds from the Boys and Girls Club camp group who visited different stations, nicknamed “islands,” in the club’s gymnasium. Their final goal was to find a hidden treasure -and, of course, learn the basics of saving money, understand the workings of banks and credit unions, and appreciate the value of giving money to charity. Making a profit along the way was also not so bad.

“We chose this because we wanted to do financial education in the community,” said Sue Lapa of Yorktown, known Thursday as “Sea Legs Suzie,” who is otherwise the vice president of member services for Purchase-based Quorum. “We did some research and found that there were very few financial education services out there for little kids, who are really important to reach because they are very impressionable.”

(The URL : http://www.thejournalnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070630/NEWS02/706300351/1018)

Great idea… making learning about money in the form of a ‘pirate adventure’ — savinggg money can be fun!

Credit Cards by Hannah Waters from the Boston University Geezeo Facebook group!

Being home at my house for the summer is interesting, I get at least 3 offers from credit cards every single day. When Im at school, I obviously dont see these…my mum just automatically rips them up!

But with all these credit card offers coming to students on a daily basis, its no wonder that people get into trouble and a huge amount of debt!

Dont fall into this trap. I understand that sometimes big purchases (i.e. spring break, furniture, books, etc.) need to be purchased, and so having a credit card for those reasons is really beneficial. But why swamp yourself with 6 or so credit cards!?

Make sure you can pay off whatever money you are putting on the card within the month. Otherwise you’re just digging yourself into a never-ending hole.

Stick to one credit card…its that simple! You dont need to be paying several bills every month, that will never work out. Just dont fall into the trap of signing up for a new card everytime you get an offer, just throw the offer away instead.

Thought we’d jump on the June 29th hype

Have you ever considered what your spending says about you? Sure, there are expenses that we all share — housing, food, transportation — but quickly our spending habits reveal quite a lot. If someone peeked into your wallet what conclusions they might draw about what you value?

Here’s an example from my own life. My boyfriend spends money nearly every week to collect very specialized, rare, early photography (frequently from e-Bay). I am mildly interested in this sort of photography. But do I value it enough to plunk down money for it and keep it in a moisture-free, temperature-controlled environment? No.

In our American, consumer-driven lifestyle we’re encouraged to believe that what we buy = who we are.

Don’t think about it — just decide where you want to buy it from! Once you buy it, everything will fall into place!

So what happens when we distort this enough to think that we can buy some sense of Greater Life Purpose? Well, I witnessed this first-hand recently and let me say, it wasn’t pretty. What was it? In this instance, the “it” was a self-development course. The shocking part is that this course costs $5,000. In my mind this says, “I value ME, ME, and a double serving of ME with a cherry on top”. (You read more about this adventure here).

Self development is one thing, and not necessarily bad. But is all this spending on ourselves good? I don’t think we stop to question that nearly as often as we should. And I’m not just talking big, out-there spending like this sort of course. I’m talking about regular trips to the Gap and mindless spending as entertainment.

Aren’t there better things to value with our time, energy, and dare I say it… money?

We’ve been working hard here at Geezeo to ramp up the first version of our online personal finance manger! We expect to be launching our second beta release in about 5 or 6 days. So what’s new?

Transactions

In this release, adding or updating a bank account will automagically pull in your most recent transactions and auto-tag them for you! So even before you tag your own transactions you’ll have a pretty good idea of how you’re spending your money.

One of the first things we noticed about transactions is how ugly and unreadable transaction names can be. So we’ve done our best to clean up the names to make them more readable. But that’s not all, we allow you to add a nickname to your transactions, and if you choose, we will find all the other transactions with the original name and add your nickname to those as well.

Similarly, you can add tags to your transactions in two ways. You can add single tags or repeat tags. Single tags will only be added to that one transaction. However, when you add repeat tags, they will immediately be added to all other transactions with the same name as well as to all future transactions that come in with that name.

But wait, there’s more!

You can search your transactions based on a number of different criteria, and if you like the results of your search, you can choose to save that search as a smart folder. This will allow you to see similar results simply by clicking on your smart folder instead of building your search from scratch again!

What else?

• We’ve added Safari support
• OFX data uploads to get your historical transactions
• Simple analytics with graphs for credit card accounts
• More internal security checks and balances
• Database clustering for more data reliability

I’m probably forgetting a few things, but those are the highlights. Immediately after this release, we’ll be hard at work adding even more features!

Yesterday I was out minding my own business (perhaps too much minding business), when hit by a smell. The smell was a foul combination of urine and hotdogs, cooked up in the humidity with more than a hint of rancid body odor.

The smell belonged to a person of unknown gender who aggressively asked for money.

Depending on mood I have various reactions to panhandlers. Yesterday’s was a curt nod “no� and kept walking. To which the panhandler yelled after me:

“Cheap-o!�

This made me laugh. Cheap-o? That’s all you got? I mean, really. Thanks?

Now, there’s no denying that homeless people suffer in a variety of cruel and painful ways. Don’t worry: this isn’t to make you feel bad. It’s me who should feel bad. About a month ago I applied to volunteer at a local soup kitchen. I am by nature somewhat lazy and it’s mere steps down the street. But they never called me, and I never followed up. Again, lazy. And, oh, part of me faced up to the fact that in this example, maybe I wasn’t lazy. I was a little bit unwilling, actually. All it would do, I figured, was make me feel like a privileged jerk.

What is it about shoeless, homeless, name-callers that can make you feel so dirty? (And not dirty in the good way?)

You could argue any number of points but one of them has to be that we see people in these dire circumstances and wonder if one fiscal screw-up could land us right there next to them. Yikes.

Ever considered how many countless ways there are to screw up fiscally? Every day there are new warnings about how over-extended we are with debt. How little we save. How little we plan for retirement or how one unfortunate series of uninsured medical issues can screw you BIG TIME.

It’s enough to make you shoeless and crazy. (And crazy, not in the good way).

Just when you know a little, you realize how little you know. I mean… it can be overwhelming! At times the learning curve can feel unbearable. It’s not just the stuff you know… it’s also the habits you attempt to create or change. Damn!

The only personal solution to this fear, as I see it, is to run a good offense. Defense is good, too. But offense takes the reigns of your learning, your decisions, and ultimately your fiscal fate.

Is your financial house in order? What are you working to change? To “fix�? Do you have a plan?

I wish that homeless citizen a better future. I just hope to never be in the same unfortunate situation.

(Forgive me if the above sports metaphor doesn’t work. I didn’t learn to dribble a basketball until 6th grade. Always the slow learner…which is why I’m starting now).

20 Firefox Extensions That Will Save You Money – SavingAdvice.com Blog Wow, imagine that, your web browser working to save you money!

These are some of the questions we want to be able to answer for you quickly. Communicating directly with our customers is extremely important to us here at Geezeo, so we have decided to add Meebo Live Chat to our site. Click here to check it out! It’s cool.

We’ll do our best to have coverage throughout the day (and night). With the hours this team works, there’s a good chance you’ll always find someone online to answer your questions. Sonny is usually available from 2am to 4am (just kidding…well, sort of).

If you don’t get us live or you think your question might benefit others, please post your question to the Geezeo Support Group. And of course you can always send your questions and comment to team@geezeo.com.

Today’s Wall Street Journal features and article by Jane Kim on “Combining Social Networking With Personal Finance”. Looks like Web2.0 and personal finance is finally seeing the light of day. Some excerpts from Jane’s article include:

“It used to be that people shied away from sharing intimate details about their financial lives.

Now, amid the rising popularity of social-networking services such as Facebook and MySpace, a crop of new personal-finance Web sites is letting users post their private personal-finance details and share advice with each other on tracking their spending and making better investment decisions.”

In the article Jane highlights Geezeo’s account aggregation and the ability to check your balances from your mobile phone.

“At Geezeo, for example, users provide their passwords for their bank and credit-card accounts, which the site uses to automatically pull users’ data into its systems…The site lets members create a consolidated view of their financial accounts and use text-messaging technology to get quick balance updates from their mobile phones.”

Jane also hits on some of the social features of Geezeo…

“On Geezeo, members can create discussion groups with other users about specific financial topics…*Starting this week, users will be able to provide feedback on financial products, such as student loans, credit cards or savings accounts.”

*Product Ratings did go live this week and another more detailed post will follow

Our favorite blogger, Katie McCaskey was also interviewed.

“Katie McCaskey, a 33-year-old New Yorker, likes the anonymity of being able to discuss her personal finances online. “I recently went back to graduate school, and I freaked out about how much this degree cost me,” says the freelance artist, who now uses Geezeo to keep track of her finances. “After frustrating everybody in my family and social circle with my concerns,” she started writing a blog to swap advice on paying down debt.”

Needless to say it’s been a pretty exciting day around here. Jane’s article has instantly raised awareness around the demand for a new generation of personal finance tools, and we’re excited that Geezeo is at the forefront of this evolution.