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With the release of the 3G iPhone and iPhone 2.0 software, Apple has allowed 3rd party developers to write applications that work with the iPhone and iPod Touch and opened the app store to the public! With the world’s imagination at work, I’m sure there will be a ton of clever applications written for the personal finance world.

Since the app store opened for two days already, let’s take a look at all the personal finance applications available currently.

ACTCurrency - $0.99
Overview: A simple currency converter that becomes extremely useful when you are out of the country.
Pro: Uses are obvious.  It makes you wonder why I didn’t think of it.
Con: Why doesn’t this grab the most up-to-date currency from the web is anyone’s guess.

ACTGratuity - $0.99
Overview: Great little utility that automatically adds tip to a subtotal and splits the bill for you, letting you know how much each person should pay.
Pro: Easy and fast to use for people who go dutch often.
Con: Don’t let anyone know that you paid for this software because you can easily do the same thing on a calculator.

BigTipper - $1.99
Overview: Exactly the same thing as ACTGratuity. I guess great minds think alike!
Pro: Slightly more stylish than its competitor and multiple language support! It also offers the round function for those that care about the cents!
Con: Not only will you be talked about by people who didn’t buy any of these type of apps, ACTGratuity users will send you unpleasant comments too because it’s $1 more!

Bloomberg - Free * MoneyNing recommended *
Overview: App that offers stock quotes, charts, analysis and latest news from companies around the world.
Pro: Free! This gives E*Trade’s Mobile Pro a run for its money.
Con: Only if you work for CNBC.

Budget - $4.99 * MoneyNing recommended *
Overview: Easily track your budget. Perfect for something like the iPhone because you won’t forget to input your expenses!
Pro: Easy input, nice interface and offers graphs too!
Con: A little expensive when compared to other iPhone Apps.

Calculators - $0.99
Overview: A car and mortgage payment calculator which lets you tests out different scenarios
Pro: Finally there’s a way calculate quickly whether the car salesman is lying or not!
Con: When the typing pad shows up, half the fields are blocked from input!!

CheckPlease
Overview: This is a ultra simple calculator for people to calculate tips, taxes and splitting of bills.
Pro: Finally someone with some sense to offer this for free!
Con: It doesn’t look as good as the paid versions but it does the job! It’s free so stop whining.

DutchTab - $2.99
Overview: Just like the others but adds a few other features like storing who paid what and who still needs to pay!
Pro: Simple interface, and great if you have friends that always say they paid last time!
Con: Not needed if you use the calculator and have decent friends!

Expense2GO - Free * MoneyNing recommended *
Overview: Create expense report and optionally sync with Salesforce CRM
Pro: Good use of the camera, capture expenses as you incur them and more!
Con: Why didn’t they come up with this before?

GarageBuy - Free
Overview: The iPhone version of GarageBuy for the mac.
Pro: Great to keep track of multiple ebay bids while on the road.
Con: There better not be affiliate links because ebay has its own app for the iPhone.

Gratuity - $0.99
Overview: Just another gratuity calculator
Pro: Another choice for us consumers
Con: Get in line! At least ACTGratuity knows he will be on top if they are sorted alphabetically!

iGold - $9.99
Overview: Displays gold, silver, and platinum prices!
Pro: Top honors for the one of the most expensive but useless iPhone App!
Con: Yahoo Finance?

iSoroban - $1.99
Overview: iPhone version of Soroban - a japanese calculator used way before the calculator was invented. This is more a game than a real useful tool.
Pro: If you are a die hard Soroban fan, then this is for you.
Con: The main benefit of Soroban is the speed of calculation and you cannot get this with the iPhone touchscreen.

iSpend - $15.99
Overview: Another expense tracker
Pro: Organized interface, easy to use.
Con: Winner of the most expensive personal finance app award.

iTip - $0.99
Overview: Yawn…
Pro: People searching tip might get this one first! It’s all in the name!
Con: I love the originality of adding the “i” in front. Here’s one. iwillnotbuythis

iXpenseIt - $4.99
Overview: Another expense tracking software.
Pro: This one offers a picture taking feature so you can take a pic of the actual receipt!
Con: Categories are too general and not easily customizable.

Loan Calc - $0.99
Overview: Simple loan calculator.
Pro: Simple and easy to use
Con: Over simplified. Looks like a way to make money off people more than a useful app.

Loan Sim - $0.99
Overview: Nice graphical loan calculator that’s very similar to Loan Calc
Pro: If $0.99 is going to save yourself from foreclosure, go for this graphical calculator!
Con: Do I really need this on an iPhone?

Mini Mortgage Manager - $1.99
Overview: Another way of saying “loan calculator”.
Pro: The graphics are nicer than others.
Con: It’s the same thing for more money!!!

Mobile Banking - Free * MoneyNing recommended *
Overview: A nice little app for Bank of America customers!
Pro: Quick way to find the closest ATM machine!
Con: No one knows where this is as secure as going through the online website.  Too bad this only works for Bank of America customers!

Nexonia Expenses - Free
Overview: Expense Tracker. Yes another one.
Pro: Free for users of Nexonia.com, email PDFs to yourself.
Con: Can’t be used for people who don’t use Nexonia.com.

PayPal - Free
Overview: Allows you to use PayPal with this app to check your balance or pay someone quickly.
Pro: Easy and quick.
Con: When was the last time you used PayPal outside of your house?

PocketMoney - $9.99 * MoneyNing recommended *
Overview: A port from Palm, this is yet another expense tracker for the iPhone
Pro: Years of experience working on the Palm version, this is the most feature-rich expense tracker available on the iPhone so far
Con: Much more expensive than other solutions and no free trial!

Puluwai Real Estate Search
Overview: Now you can quickly search for houses for sale in your area.
Pro: Perfect for the realtor!
Con: Good luck with this app in the current market. The reason why you didn’t sell those houses aren’t because of the lack of this app.

Save Benjis - Free * MoneyNing recommended *
Overview: Quickly search online for the latest low prices for anything in the market!
Pro: Amazingly simple app. Just what everyone’s been waiting for, not to mention it’s free.
Con: Input your keywords carefully or else you will get information overload!  I’m surprised that not many people have thought of this app yet so this is the only choice (even though it’s a good one).

ShoppingList - Free
Overview: Keep track of your shopping list conveniently on the iPhone
Pro: Easy to use, easily keep track of what you already bought and haven’t
Con: You can do all this for free with notes but it’s only $0.99 so it might be worth the price. Inputting everything you need before you leave the house might be a pain though.

Spend - $1.99
Overview: Budget tracker
Pro: Cheap
Con: Better solutions out there. For such an important app, paying more for the best might be worth it.

SplashMoney - $9.99
Overview: Budget……tracker……
Pro: Password protection, wirelessly connect to online banks, quick shortcut.
Con: There are so many of these it’s hard to choose one!

TapExpense - $4.99
Overview: Another one!!!
Pro: Doesn’t need the input keyboard
Con: There are better ones out there.

Tip Calc - $0.99
Overview: Tip Calculator #83
Pro: Simple, small form footprint
Con: Maybe too simple to warrant paying for it

TipCalc - $0.99
Overview: Tip Calculator #83 (this isn’t a typo)
Pro: See above
Con: See above

Tipper - $1.99
Overview: Was there a group competition to write the tip software?
Pro: The author is welcome to contact me to change this section because I don’t know what to write
Con: More expensive and the name should be changed to tip calculator #83

Tips - $1.99
Overview: He must be the first person to come up with this or something because he got the name!
Pro: The interface is simple and it looks pretty good.
Con: More money for the same thing!

Tipulator - $0.99
Overview: Tip calculator #83
Pro: Optional tip rounding to the nearest dollar! Wow!
Con: Split checks among several people! Oh is this the section for disadvantages?

TripLog/1040 - $12.99
Overview: A way to keep track of your business expenses
Pro: Perfect for salespeople. Allows you to email yourself a log so data can be transferred to the computer unlike most other apps currently.
Con: No one knows all the features because no one can figure out the UI yet.

Currently, not many applications exists for the iPhone but as Apple’s 100M development fund is put into use, better and better applications will be written. I’m excited to see the potential of the app store and foresee more and more companies writing free extensions of their website to work with the iPhone to provide better, faster and more convenient services.

If you haven’t already, perhaps now is the time to line up to buy a new iPhone.

Photo Credit - Apple, Inc

The accountant once asked our boss to consider having companies handle our accounts receivable to reduce risk. The extra fees was like paying insurance to make sure we get paid because sometimes it is hard to tell if our customers have the cash to pay us on our invoices. At the time, I didn’t know that it was called invoice factoring.

Factoring is basically selling your accounts receivable to some other company at a discount so you can get cash immediately. Most companies usually don’t do this because they are in effect getting less money for their products/services, but sometimes it make sense because there are
some customers that do not pay on time, while others don’t pay at all.

Another advantage of using a factoring company is to help provide needed financing. Sometimes, new companies have a hard time getting loans because there is a lack of established longevity. By using factoring services, the company gets immediate cash flow which yields the same results as a loan.

Even the best-run businesses can run into cash flow. My boss sometimes would say that everyone often says things are delayed with good reason, but he cannot tell anyone that the paychecks will be late for any reason. When cash flow is tight, a factoring company can provide much needed cash quickly.

From my experience, most customers are good companies in that they want to pay their invoices. At certain times however, the same companies do not pay because they have a tight cash flow (hence they will pay late) or if the paperwork on their end is messed up. Using factoring services will help because they will deal with the headaches of invoice collection instead of your people trying to manage this. There were times when I wasted a good portion of my time each day because I needed to keep calling them to make sure they pay us soon. Those were the times when I wished I used factoring companies to handle all that.

I ran across the site Debt Consolidation Care recently and was quite impressed by the service that they provide. Unlike other debt consolidation services, they’ve added a community (aka forum) on their site where members can discuss and share anything and everything about debt. With 94,000 members, there’s bound to be someone who can help answer your question.

The forum includes topics such as Debt Consolidation and Settlement, Payday Loan Help, Dealing with Collection Agencies all neatly separated into its own section. Each section has its own members that are very active and helpful about discussing with you about the section’s subject. For example, the collection agency forum not only has discussions from people who are dealing with collection agencies but also information about the industry so you can learn about how these companies work.

Of course they would like to help you by offering their services to you. They claim that you can lower your monthly payments, reduce interest rate, waive late fees, eliminate collection calls, avoid bankruptcy, and become debt free by working with them. With a free consultation, this sounds like a great option if you are in financial trouble!

* I will be giving away 4 copies of this book to my email subscribers this Saturday (10/6/2007). If you still haven’t subscribed yet, do so here.
–
The Quiet Millionaire is a book that contains a wealth of information on personal finance topics. With forty plus years of professional experience as a personal and business financial advisor, Brett Wilder shares with us his expertise on how to accumulate and keep our wealth.

This book’s theme is tied very closely to the title of the book – the quiet millionaire. Instead of writing about how to be frugal or the secret to picking the right stock at the right time, this book focuses on how the average population can carefully plan and be a millionaire with time, patience and good probability.

One of the first Brett advices is to discover who the real you is and what you really want out of life, while making sure we plan for money to be our servant instead of being our master.

Next, he explains to us the seven major obstacles to Financial Success:
1. Undisciplined Spending
2. Materialistic Thinking
3. Burdensome Costly Debt
4. Taxes
5. Inflation
6. Poorly Structured Investment Portfolios
7. Unforeseen Life-Changing, Financially Devastating Events
This sets up the rest of the book where he tackles all sorts of topics such as cash flow, investing, taxes, and retirement.

Cash Flow
The key to having a positive cash flow involves knowing where our money is going. This includes creating a budget, in which personal finance software such as Quicken or Microsoft Money can help. Other tips include having a plan to determine cash flow requirements to fund future goals and objectives and paying ourselves first with automatic savings deductions.

Investing
Brett is a big advocate of low cost index funds. He believes in the long run, most people will end up leaving money on the table by trading individual stocks because many of us let our emotions get in the way. This is great advice for so many people because this totally takes the maintenance work required for stock picking out of the equation and just let the money work for us.

Taxes
In order to minimize taxes paid, we should actively plan for tax reductions. This means proactively perform intelligent tax reduction to maximize our after-tax dollars throughout the entire year.

Retirement
Once we retire, the primary focus should be to protect and preserve our wealth instead of trying to accumulate and grow it. One of the advices given is to establish a lifetime gift-giving program to reduce the value of his/her estate and transfer it to someone else over time without incurring taxes.

Target Audience
The book is for people who have a good income stream and would like the extra help to accumulate and keep their wealth through time. People looking for the secret to getting rich quickly are not going to find what they are looking for in this book.

Last Words
From the cover and title to the content, this book is about substance. There is nothing fancy in this book, just straight forward personal finance information that we can all benefit.

* As mentioned at the top, don’t miss your chance to receive a free copy of this book. All you need to do is be an email subscriber by clicking here.

It is always a good idea to plan for disasters. This is a review of the website that helps you do exactly this. Here is the description from the author itself:

AxcessPoints is a secure online planning resource that helps individuals and families better organize critical personal, medical and financial information and minimize the impact of a natural disaster.

Most of us probably are very cautious when we sign up for new tools, especially when there is a fee. This site allows us a 30-day free trial without giving out our credit card information, so I signed up for an account. After providing some basic information (email, date of birth, name and addresses), I was able to get an account instantly without getting those usual confirmation emails.

After looking through, the account basically allows us to store all our emergency contacts, medical histories, and other information like our insurance information. Another feature in the site helps us build an emergency kit by giving us a checklist of what is really needed depending on how many months of supplies we want to store.

Apart from the account, the website also has a very comprehensive library section that talks about many different topics relating to preparing on disasters. This is a must read for everyone because we can never gain enough knowledge of preparing for disasters.

Overall, this site provides many articles of disaster related materials and also a way for us to organize our information for an online disaster toolkit. Check it out at AxcessPoints.

Introduction
As the website name relocation.com suggests, this site is for the people looking to move. It provides many resources such as buying a house, mortgages, jobs, moving companies etc.

As with many of these sites, there is always a revenue stream or a way that the site authors hope to make money. I look around for this on the site, and found that they have a few banner ads as well as forms where they refer companies to you depending on your moving needs.

Under every category, there are forms in which you can leave the details of the service you are looking for (e.g. insurance, moving) so someone can contact you to proceed with helping you out.

Layout
The website layout is a little on the basic side, as there isn’t much coloring on the site other than the major white background. It would be great if they can add more pictures and / or jazzier coloring scheme to entice the reader into reading more.

Content
A quick look in the moving section for example shows many forms get quotes, but there are lots of articles on various aspects of moving in their library section.

In the library, there are guides for real estate, mortgage, career, home improvements, and of course with moving. Each article is short and provides good basic information for people looking to move.

Conclusion
The goal of relocation.com should be to provide a good resource for readers so they will use their services. They for sure have a good start and I will add more content to build up their value in the future as well as upgrade their website design to increase reader interest.

For those that are interested, they also have sister sites for auto shipping and international movers which provide similar services that are worth checking out if you are looking for those types of services.

Website:

http://www.mortgageloanplace.com/lending-guide

Initial Thoughts:

Mortgage Loan Place is primarily a site that helps you obtain loans, the site contains a blog along with a section that includes many articles about lending.? The major categories are as follows:

• FHA Loans
• Reverse Mortgages
• Home Mortgages
• Mortgage Insurance
• Refinancing
• Second Mortgages

At a glance, the layout of the lending guide section is somewhat dry because the page contains many links and not much else.? As a contrast, the main site has a much richer in terms of color and attractiveness.

However, diving deeper into the content articles provide much insight about different areas related to mortgages.? For example, one of the articles is named ??/font>4 Things You Need to Be Eligible for a Reverse Mortgage??which illustrates some of the items you need to check before you know you can use that as an option.\