More Personal Finance Fun

Yes, as I've mentioned in the past, I'm a bit of a personal finance nut. Does this mean that I always make wise financial decisions? No. I probably spend too much money on travel, and I recently brought out the plastic for a Memorial Day sale at Anthropologie. And I'm not into the whole "latte factor" thing, because, well, I really heart Starbucks.

But I do try to pay off my credit cards monthly, and do the best I can with the money I save. To that end, I'm a big fan of the online savings accounts, like ING and Emigrant Direct. They offer the high interest rates you find with CDs and money market accounts, but without the restrictions. And, for the most part, they're FDIC-insured, so it's not like the internet is going to run off with your money. The only downside is that it takes a couple of days to get the money out of the account, but that shouldn't be a problem if you're really trying to save it. And I always try to keep $100 or so in my WaMu savings account that's tied with my checking for true emergencies.

Anyway, all of my financial commentary is going somewhere here. Today, I saw this roundup of some of the online banks on smartmoney.com. It's pretty handy, and I kind of wish I had it last year when I was figuring out where to put my cash. For the record, I have two online savings accounts--I keep short-term savings (travel, car repairs, etc.) and money I save to pay freelance taxes in ING, which is super user-friendly and has a yield of 4.5 percent. I like ING because it's easy to create different categories for your savings. For long-term savings (basically money we're saving to buy a house) I use Emigrant Direct, which has a higher yield of 5.05 percent, but is one really ugly-ass website.

Basically, yay for high interest! And personal finance is edgy and fun!