Smartlife

Taking your finances to the web can make them easier to manage: not only can you access information from wherever you happen to be, but you can gain access to many features not even available in desktop software. Many online tools offer you ways to integrate all of your financial information, even pulling it in from other financial-related websites such as your institutional bank and investment broker. So we’ve compiled a list of over 100 sites where you can manage your finances online. Who knows, one of these sites might just…

April 15 is rapidly approaching and that means that we all need to get our taxes in order. For a lot of us, that means finding someone to help us: not only do most people dislike handing over a percentage of their income to the government, there are plenty of complexities that make an expert’s opinion invaluable. There are several parts to the process of preparing taxes, and you might be surprised just how much you can hand off to someone else.

Gift cards are a popular choice for holiday gifts: they don’t require a lot of shopping, they’re easy to ship, and they seem a little more tasteful than cold hard cash. This explains why Americans dropped $97 billion on gift cards last year and are expected to spend more than $100 billion this year. But receiving gift cards isn’t always as easy as giving them. Driving all over town to redeem your gift certificate is the least of your worries. What if you don’t have a particular store in your town? Or if that store has gone out of business between the time the gift card was bought and when you received it? What if you forget to redeem it?

Receipts are a necessary evil: you have to have them to track expenses, calculate tax deductions, and manage your finances. Despite the fact that we need organized receipts, however, most of us resort to the shoe-box method: throw all the receipts in one box and toss it in the closet. It’s not that we don’t know that we need receipts — it’s just that it can take a lot of time to sort and record all those slips of paper. There is a way to get it done without going crazy, though: outsource it. One website, in particular, makes it easy to let someone else handle sorting your receipts. Shoeboxed will scan and categorize every receipt you can send them with no worries.

Financial professionals can be as specialized as doctors. One might be best at helping you manage investments, while another is the guy you absolutely have to talk to before filing your taxes. Sorting through financial professionals can be a little complicated though — do you really need one of each kind of professional to help make sure that all your paperwork is in order and your money is taken care of? It seems like that’s just an opportunity to pay out even more of your money in bills. Instead, there’s really only about five financial professionals you really need to know.

ING DIRECT offers an automated investment service called ShareBuilder. It mimics the way Direct Purchase and Dividend Reinvestment Plans (DRIPs) work, by allowing you to invest fixed amounts of money, with a price of $4 per share. With ShareBuilder, you don’t actually purchase individual shares of stock like you would with a traditional investment plan. Instead, because you buy shares based on the amount of money you want to invest, you often wind up with fractions of shares.