money

There are a lot of programs (not to mention Web sites) out there these days that make keeping track of your personal finances practically effortless. If software creators are hoping to compete with these extremely effective and well-designed programs, they'd better go big or go home. We wish that the creators of JaHoCa had gone home.

The very first thing we look for in personal finance software is the capability to import transactions that users have downloaded from their banks. JaHoCa does not offer this feature, and we have trouble imagining why anyone would want to manually enter each … Read more

President Obama announced Wednesday that he is directing nearly $600 million in American Recovery and Reinvestment Act awards to repair, rebuild, or altogether replace federally designated community health centers across the country, $88 million of which has been earmarked to help digitize medical records.

"These investments won't just increase efficiency and lower costs," Obama told community health leaders with members of Congress at his side. "They'll improve the quality of care as well, preventing countless medical errors and allowing providers to spend less time with paperwork and more time with patients."

The $508.5 … Read more

The holiday season is upon us and we know most of you are struggling to "find the money" to buy gifts for your friends and family, so we make the long trip across the hallway and invite Jill Schlesinger on the show to help us keep our heads above water. Jill is editor at large for CBS MoneyWatch.com and has plenty of experience with financial planning, so listen up!

As you might already know from past episodes featuring The Financial Decoder, Jill isn't the biggest fan of credit card companies, or "legalized drug dealers," as she calls them, but this time she has her scope pointed at the dangers of using a debit card.

Despite proposed laws that would outlaw overdraft fees, Jill suspects we haven't seen the end of hidden fees and actually recommends budgeting this season with presents that won't leave you with an empty bank account. Your dear old mom doesn't really need that Tiffany's necklace or box of Godiva chocolates! Leave that stuff for Mother's Day, and just go out and have fun together--it's free, and it won't drain your bank account.

Jill also drops knowledge on us (in a Bulgarian accent, no less) about how to develop optimistic (and realistic) financial goals for the year instead of frantically scrambling to plan around the holidays. With Valentine's Day coming up, it's too bad Jeff isn't here! Jill tells us the best way to stop the cycle of "hedonic spending" is to play a game she calls "Find the Money."

Have fun and play games while balancing your spending and saving money at the same time?! Be sure to listen to this episode of The 404 Podcast to get the whole story!

Good news for fans of Redbox movie-rental kiosks: the new Redbox app (free) lets you browse and reserve movies and find the kiosk nearest you. Cool.

Better news for Redbox fans: the new Red Box Free Rental Promo Codes app (from third-party developer Neese) means you may never have to pay for another movie.

The app aggregates codes from around the Internet and various promo mailings, updating them every 12 hours so you're sure to have the latest and greatest.

When you get to the Redbox checkout screen, just tap "Rent with a Promo Code," then type … Read more

Cashbook Complete Accounting can help manage your company's finances. It can handle most any bookkeeping task. It will manage incoming and outgoing expenses, employee timesheets, list of contacts, and invoices for projects and jobs. You can also use it to run and print invoices, balance sheets, and profit and loss reports, and e-mail them to your customers or export them to financial-planning software. It will manage your company's bank accounts and even import data from your bank. There's a built-in backup utility, too.

Cashbook Complete Accounting is a good accounting solution for small- to medium-size companies. The … 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

Criminals have tried to steal an estimated $100 million from corporate bank accounts using targeted malware and money mules, the FBI said on Tuesday.

"Within the last several months, the FBI has seen a significant increase in fraud involving the exploitation of valid online banking credentials belonging to small and medium businesses, municipal governments, and school districts," the agency said in a statement.

The FBI is seeing, on average, several new victim complaints and cases every week, according to a report prepared by the Internet Crime Complaint Center and linked to in the FBI release.

Brian Krebs reported … Read more

Adarian Money for Windows offers to keep your finances in order with a simple setup and surprising options. While it takes a lot of work, it dissects finances so well that it's well worth the effort.

The program's interface felt instantly comfortable, since its rows and columns reminded us of online banking software. Its clearly labeled commands and intuitive flow was never difficult to manage. While the program offered to handle all your financial matters, including checking, savings, cash and even investments, it was a lot of initial effort to set up. We needed to manually enter every … Read more