About a month ago, I switched my primary checking account from my local brick and mortar bank to ING Direct’s Electric Orange online checking. What is Electric Orange? Electric Orange is an online-only checking account offered by ING Direct. In short, that means you do all of your checking account business either online or with

Regular compound interest is (basically) the way most loans and savings accounts work, including home mortgages. Here, we’re going to use a spreadsheet to calculate a home mortgage payment estimator (and even a full payment schedule) using the principles of compound interest. Fire up your spreadsheet and enter the following information into cells: In A1,

Previously, we discussed how compound interest works on a year-by-year basis, but in the real world, interest is usually compounded more often than that. For many purposes, monthly compounding is used, so let’s look at monthly compounding. Fire up your spreadsheet and enter a few labels: In A1, enter Monthly Compound Interest Example In A3,

Several readers have written me excitedly asking how exactly I do some of the calculations on this site and how compound interest works. Usually, I point them at various online calculators, but the truth of the matter is that a basic understanding of how a spreadsheet works and how compound interest works makes it possible

While doing some calculations for my income taxes, I stumbled across the statement from my checking account for February 2006, just before my financial meltdown. Amused, I spent some time really looking at the staement when I noticed that there were several ATM fees on the bill and a few sales tax dings on those

Recently, I’ve received emails from people asking me what I think of various checking accounts, such as ING’s Electric Orange or EverBank. I realized that time and time again I used the same criteria to compare various checking and savings accounts, and thus I thought I would share these criteria with you. I rank these

If you haven’t heard the news, HSBC Direct is running a promotion from January 29 to April 30, 2007. During that promotion, all new deposits earn 6.00% APY through April 30, 2007. Naturally, given my curious self, I couldn’t help but wonder how good of a deal this is, so I used a pretty standard

Recently, CNNMoney.com posted an article containing 35 outrageous fees, along with tips on avoiding them. Unfortunately, due to the terrible layout of the article (you’re forced to jump from page to page in a very awkward fashion), it’s almost impossible to see all of the fees and also jump to the one you want to

I’m on the verge of taking the plunge and switching to ING’s Electric Orange checking account, but one thing has kept me from switching over: the hassle of moving all of my deposits and transfers to a new bank. Given that, I’ve prepared a plan for moving to a new checking account that should pave

I’ve been weighing the positives and negatives of ING’s new Electric Orange checking account, which is now available to some existing ING Direct customers and will be available to everyone in a few months. Rather than repeating what’s already been said, I encourage you to read this fine summary of Electric Orange at The Sun’s

When I compared ING and HSBC, I discussed how HSBC’s annual percentage yield of 5.05% is significantly better than ING’s annual percentage yield of 4.4%, but I felt that ING’s service was significantly better. One of the comments, from Boston Gal, made the astute observation that ING’s current “signing bonus” of $25 did a good

Over the past few months, I signed up with both ING Direct and HSBC Direct in order to try out their online savings offerings. I had heard many positive reviews of the service at ING, but I was also stunned at the 5.05% APY interest rate being offered at HSBC. To make up my mind,