finances

Money Forecaster makes predictions about your financial future based on your current fiscal condition. Although we like the idea of this program and think it could be quite useful, we found it confusing and frustrating to use.

First impressions count, and Money Forecaster's interface is nice enough to look at and seems fairly intuitive. According to the Quick Start guide, the program is quite simple to use: just configure your accounts, add your income and expenses, and set your money goals. However, it turned out to be more complicated than it sounds. Money Forecaster allows you to set up … Read more

Google has added a few new features in hopes of attracting more users to Google Finance, blending financial stories from Google News right into the mix.

Yahoo owns the online financial information market with Yahoo Finance (rated first in its category by ComScore with 22 million unique visitors in September), but Google is trying to carve out a niche for itself by adding a so-called "real time" stream of news to Google Finance pages. On the main Google Finance page, users can now click on a news tab that brings up what appears to be a constantly updated … Read more

Quick MBA is a set of Excel worksheets geared toward entrepreneurs who need help with business planning. The program is rife with business jargon and is obviously geared toward users who appreciate this style of planning; some users may find it too formal for their needs.

Although the program is an Excel workbook, the creators did a nice job of making it look like more than a glorified spreadsheet. We liked that the program's setup is relatively simple, with an interactive dialogue that helps users choose the appropriate business model and set goals accordingly. A "sales funnel" … Read more

Wireless broadband provider Clearwire said late Tuesday that it is has racked up another $920 million in debt to help it finance the deployment of its nationwide 4G wireless network.

The company had already nabbed $1.85 billion of senior secured notes due in 2015 to help it pay off an existing $1.4 billion debt payment. In total, Clearwire has raised nearly $2.8 billion in debt and equity in the past few weeks.

Earlier this month, some of the company's investors also kicked in an additional $1.5 billion in funding. Sprint Nextel, Intel, Comcast, and Time … Read more

Facebook is changing the structure of its company stock to a dual-class system, a move that hints the company may be looking toward an initial public offering--even though it says it has no plans to do so yet.

Here's how it works. Existing Facebook shareholders currently have Class A stock. That'll be converted to Class B stock, which has 10 times the voting power of Class A. Should those shareholders sell their stock when Facebook goes public, they'll be converted back into Class A stock--otherwise, they'll stay the way they are.

The story was first reported by The Wall Street Journal, … Read more

Chase announced Monday a partnership with Facebook to power the finance company's inaugural "Community Giving" campaign, which will allocate a total of $5 million to small, local nonprofits voted on by Facebook members.

The campaign takes the form of--you guessed it--a Facebook Platform application, in which members can choose their favorite of more than 500,000 nonprofits. Naturally, then, they're encouraged to use the hallowed "social graph" to encourage their friends to do so as well.

The winner gets $1 million in a grand-prize announcement slated for February 1; five runners-up get $100,… Read more

Home Bookkeeping Lite purportedly is a tool to help users manage their personal finances. Our experiences with it, however, suggest it is a tool of annoyance and time-wasting.

The program's interface is pleasantly uncluttered, so we were optimistic. The first major drawback that we encountered is that the program does not allow users to import transactions from their bank's Web site. We acknowledge that there may be some users who don't use online banking, but we suspect that most people will want to import the data and not spend hours entering transactions manually. For users who do … Read more

Mint launched a new tool on Thursday that gives users real-time updates on the latest personal-finance topics hitting Twitter.

Dubbed Money Tweets, the personal-finance service's new feature tracks tweets about everything from investing and saving to the most popular finance-related topics at any given time. It also has a "question of the day" option where Mint poses a question and displays all the tweets that answer it.

To ensure Money Tweets doesn't list any tweets that might be offensive or contain links to potentially malicious sites, the … Read more

There are probably as many personal budgeting programs out there as most of us have dollars in our checking accounts, and most of them use traditional accounting methods in which income and expenses are recorded after the money is spent. Budget for Windows by Snowmint Creative Solutions uses an increasingly popular alternative, the envelope method. It's similar to the way many people once budgeted for expenses, by placing money aside in envelopes for next month's rent, groceries, and so on, as soon as they're paid. The envelope method can actually help you stick to a budget, too. … Read more