Tax ARTICLE - 4 Tech Tools to Help You With Your Personal Finances

Target Audience: Business Owners, Financial Managers, Accounting Consulting Firm Advisement Interest, Non-Tech Savvy Individuals, Tax News and Business Updates, Tax Hints and Tips Interest

By now, most people use technology, in one form or another, to manage their personal finances. There may, however, be a few technological options out there that you’ve either never heard of or never fully considered. Here are four examples:

1. Online banking and bill pay.

If you still wait for that paper statement to arrive in the mail every month, you might want to pay a visit to your bank’s Web site. Online banking allows you to access your accounts 24 hours a day, seven days a week from virtually any location in the world via the Internet. You can review account balances, deposits and cleared checks as well as pay bills and transfer and receive money.

In addition, don’t forget that banking online means you can access funds sooner, because transactions are processed and posted faster than with traditional banking methods. And, if you check account information more frequently, you’re more likely to identify any fraudulent activities sooner.

2. Rich site summary (RSS) feeds to your mobile device.

Do you have a cell phone or personal digital assistant (PDA)? If so, you don’t need to be tied to your computer to obtain information affecting your personal finances. RSS is a data format that enables Web sites to send, or “feed,” information, in categories of your choosing, directly to your cell phone or PDA.

For example, just about any of the major search engines (such as Yahoo! and Google) offer RSS feeds. So, if you’re an active investor, you can get up-to-the-minute notifications about market activity. Or, if you’re looking for the best deal on a particular item, most shopping sites allow you to set up an RSS feed to target the absolute latest sale prices.

3. Social networking sites.

Even if you don’t participate, you‘ve probably heard about Web sites such as MySpace.com and Facebook.com, which allow users to set up detailed personal profiles as a means of interacting with one another. Recently, this concept has expanded to focus onpersonal finance.

For instance, on Web sites such as Wesabe.com and Geezeo.com, participants form online communities that share information and anecdotes about meeting financial goals. There are also investment-specific social networking sites, such as Zecco.com and Wikinvest.com.

Bear in mind, social networking sites aren’t for everyone and, obviously, you must be very careful about sharing details about your personal finances with strangers.But sometimes the support can be helpful.

4. Personal finance podcasts.

You may associate the term “podcast” with Apple’s now-ubiquitous iPod (or, more recently, iPhone) listening devices.

But, in essence, a podcast is simply a radio show saved as an audio file that you can listen to on any computer or listening device that plays audio files.

So the next time you’re checking your bank statement online or e-mailing a friend about your financial goals, you can be listening to a podcast from, say, the Wall Street Journal, Kiplinger.com (a personal finance news site) or many other sources. You may encounter ideas that would be great to discuss with your financial advisor, who could help you determine whether and how they might apply to your specific situation.

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