Recomendations

This is a list of products and services that I believe in and/or use. Some of these products give us a referral fee if a user signs up, others do not.

Personal Capital: Personal Capital is by far the best tool for tracking your finances in real time that I have found; best of all, it’s free! Personal Capital can automatically track all your bank accounts, investment accounts, and debt accounts together.  In one snapshot I can see our income and expenses for the month across all 3 of the checking accounts we have.  Like many people we also have investment accounts in different areas as well, between our HSA, IRAs, and 401K we have 6 different investment accounts and Personal Capital shows me the data from all of them at once, this saves me tons of time and gives me a clear picture of where my money is.

Betterment: I love the concept of Betterment and am planning on opening up a taxable brokerage account with them soon. We currently have our retirement accounts with Vanguard. Betterment makes investing and saving SIMPLE. They use only index funds (winning!) and they allow you to be diversified among multiple index funds with your first dollar. This just isn’t possible with a normal brokerage account.  For people starting out without 10K plus, I think Betterment is the best option, even for those with more money Betterment is still an awesome deal and makes investing super simple at a low cost. Betterment charges a small percentage fee (like most mutual fund companies) and a small monthly fee of $3 a month if less than $100 is deposited every month.

Health Savings Administrators: As far as I am concerned this is the only place to have an HSA.  They allow for first dollar investing in 22 different vanguard funds, many of them Admiral funds! They charge a fee of .0008 cents per thousand dollars per quarter, on up to $20,000 invested per fund (the fee freezes after that) and a $45 yearly account fee. Up to 4 funds are allowed at a time. The really great thing is you can set up to have a portion of your money put to a debit card for medical expenses and the rest into investments however you like.

Amazon Prime 30 day free trial: Prime offers free 2 day shipping on most amazon items, tens of thousands of movies and TV shows, now including several items in the HBO catalog, AND allows for borrowing of books from the Kindle Lending Library.  At $99 a year it is a great deal. I love that I don’t have to worry about shipping costs when I buy stuff.

Better World Books: I LOVE betterworld books, and not just because they are located relatively close to me.  Their mission is awesome. They take donated used books and sell them online, the profits are used to fund literacy programs. They also donate an amazing amount of books to other countries to benefit literacy programs abroad. To date Betterworld has donated over 12.5 Million books, and recycled or re-used over 131 million books.  Used books are less expensive than new books, so the buyer wins too! I have bought dozens for books from betterworld.

GoDaddy: I use GoDaddy for my web hosting and domain registration. So far I have been happy with my service. They offer reasonable rates and have an easy to use platform.