WTDirect $250 Bonus For New Accounts Ends Wednesday

UPDATE: This WTDirect Promo has expired, their latest promo can be found here.

Just a reminder that WTDirect’s bonus of up to $250 when opening a new account ends tomorrow (Wednesday December 31st.)

You can earn up to $250 bonus depending on the amount you fund your account with. WTDirect’s savings rate is 3.06%. On top of the bonus money this is a great way to make a little extra cash on your money that probably isn’t earning much interest now anyway.

Check out this post for details:
WTDirect Promo – Up To $250 Bonus for New Account

Happy Holidays!

Everyone here at Budgetcents wishes you and your family a joyous holiday season! We will be back after Christmas with more Credit Card, Bank and Brokerage deals to help get a little cash in your pocket!

Thanks for being a reader!

Advanta Mastercard 90 Days No Interest Forever

Advanta has come out with an interesting new Net 90 Mastercard which defers the interest for 90 days on charges. This is not an introductory offer and applies to all purchases.

To put this in perspective most cards give you 30 days from the beginning of the statement until you need to pay for the charges you make. Having 60 more days with no interest makes things interesting since you can float all those charges and earn interest on that money by putting it in a high yield savings account rather than having to pay the bill each month.

If you get on a cycle of paying for your charges 90 days later, each month you are floating 2 months worth of charges. You could potentially save quite a bit of money in interest by doing that. Just to make sure you track your purchase and when they need to be paid off! You don’t want to get caught in a rut of paying interest every month.

Some other benefits other than the 90 days no interest are a cash back rewards program as well as no annual fee.

This is a business card, but you can apply as an individual. See the application page for more details.

Cheap Fax Service Review – SaveOnFaxes.com

To save money on phone service I switched over to Voice Over IP a long time ago. I have done a few posts regarding this and in many cases I keep getting questions asking if you can fax over VoIP. In the quest to save money and switch from the standard phone companies to VoIP we forget that fax isn’t supported on any Voice Over IP service out there.

I am in this boat as well. I’ve tried faxing over Vonage, faxing over Broadvoice and also tried faxing over T-Mobile’s Hotspot at Home and have in some cases been able to get a fax or two to complete, but over all it is not consistent. I decided to try one of those online fax services where you send faxes via an email to an email address which in turn faxes it to the number you want it sent to. All the fax services I tried all seem to work well, but they are expensive. Send2Fax.com is $9 per month and eFax.com will run you around $14 per month. Both offer around 120 free faxes for the month. This is great if you have a high volume of faxes. But what if you only want around half that? Enter SaveOnFaxes.com!

SaveOnFaxes.com is setup more for the casual user. Their basic plan only costs $3.75 (billed anually at $44.95) and it gives you 50 free faxes a month. This comes out to about .$07 per fax for the year. Best part is that you get your own local or toll free fax number that you can give out to others. Other fax services charge you extra for a toll free number! All faxing is done through email (See demo below). You just send an email to faxnumber@my.saveonfaxes.com from the email account that you used to sing up and that email will turn into a fax that will be sent to that faxnumber. You can also include attachments in PDF or Microsoft Office format that will also be included in the fax. This is great if you have a scanner. All you need to do is scan the document and then send it as an attachment in an email and your fax is complete.

You receive any faxes right into your email as a PDF document. Since this is all done via email you can literally send and receive faxes from a cell phone if your phone has email and attachment capability. There is also an online portal where you can see the status / history of your inbound and outbound faxes as well as update your account information.

I have been testing their service for a few months and it suits my needs and budget. They definetly seem to be the cheapest Internet fax service out there. I can handle paying $45 a year for faxing since I can’t do it over my VoIP. There are some other sites that let you pay as you fax, but they don’t give you your own number. This is important to me since you never know when someone will need your fax number. Now you can really kill your landline since your faxing options are now covered!

Check out SaveOnFaxes.com for more details and happy faxing!

UPDATE:

I decided to put together a quick example of how this all works so you can see how easy it is. (Click on any images to see a larger easier to read version)

The process starts out by simply creating an email from the email account that you used when you signed up for SaveonFaxes.com:

Notice the makeup of the TO: field. The first item is the name, this will appear in the “To:” field on the fax cover sheet, the next item is the Company, this will appear in the “Company:” field on the cover sheet. (Those first two items are optional, but if you are doing a cover sheet it makes things look complete). Then the last item, which is most important is thefax number you are sending the fax to. Then the “@my.saveonfaxes.com” email domain name is used everytime you send a fax.

In the email subject add whatever you want the fax cover sheet Subject to have on it. And any text you put in the body of the email will appear in the body of the cover sheet. Notice that I also attached a word docment. Here is what the one page word document looks like before I sent it off:

Nothing too exciting, but if you need to fax documents, adding it as an attachment to the email makes it very easy. You can attach multiple documents to the email and they will all appear on seperate pages in the fax that is sent. The attachment types that SaveonFaxes.com supports are the following:

Ok, everything is ready on your email, so now you need to send it. Once you send the email you can log into the SaveonFaxes.com online portal to monitor the status if you wish.

The portal allows you to see what is going on as well as allows you to resend the same fax with a click of a button, so you don’t have to contstruct the email again.

Now remember I sent an email with an attachment, so my fax that was sent will be multiple pages. One for the cover sheet and then as many pages as the attachments need. Since the word doc I created was only one page this fax will have a total of two pages.

Here are the screen shots of what the received fax looks like:

Notice all of the fields that I put on the email have nicely transfered into the correct positions on the cover sheet. And that the contents of the word document on a sepeate page of the fax.

SaveonFaxes.com also provides other commands that you can put in the subject line of the email to do things like suppress the cover sheet, add billing codes, etc.

As you can see SaveonFaxes.com is relatively easy to use and is cost effective enough to allow you to have it as an option to your VoIP line. I have been using this service for a few months now and am extremely happy with the results.

Free Turbotax For State Farm Customers – 2008 Tax Year

Once again State Farm is giving away Intuit’s Online TurboTax Free to its customers. They have done this for the last 2 years and it has been very successful. This year is a bit different however. This year you can only get access to the free Tubotax by having a State Farm Bank product added to your online account. Just having a State Farm insurance product isn’t good enough. State Farm bank offers products such as Credit Cards, Savings/Checking accounts and CD’s.

One easy way to get this is to sign up for a State Farm Credit Card. They have no annual fee and once you get your card you can setup access to get onto the State Farm Portal. Once you log in, you will see the following “File Your Taxes For Free” link.

Once you click through that link you will be directed to the TurboTax site with their online product listing and fees. Notice that only TurboTax Basic and Deluxe are Free, however the Premier and Home & Business versions are severely discounted.

Also note that it says “State Additional”. They said that last year too but there was no charge once you completed your taxes. As I get closer to filing my 2008 taxes, I will update this post to verify that the state filing fee is in fact free.

The online version of TurboTax does not require any software install on your part. Everything is kept online securely and is available to print out anytime even after you file your taxes. All your data from the previous years is carried forward to help reduce retyping all that data every year. I have used it for the past 3 years and have had no complaints. One advantage of the online version versus the desktop version is that you get immediate updates. No more waiting to download federal and state updates!

Also be sure to remember that if it takes you a few sessions to complete your taxes, be sure to get into TurboTax through the State Farm link each time. There have been reports that you only need to go through the State Farm link the final time before you file, but just to be safe I would always use the link each time you need to go back in.

If you don’t have any State Farm accounts, Turbo Tax has pretty decent rates to file your taxes (See the TurboTax site for details.) I have used quite a few online tax preparation sites and in my opinion Turbo Tax is definitely the best way to go.

Use Those Old Credit Cards!

Your credit score is basically your financial resume. It is what could save you thousands of dollars in interest by getting you the best rates based on your financial history. One factor that affects your credit score is the average length of your credit history. This is generated by looking at your earliest credit account.

We are all told to keep those old credit accounts open so your average is higher. You will receive better interest rates if your average credit account is 10 years old, for example, versus a new account you just opened. Previously you could just cut the card up and leave that account dormant forever. However these days, due to the current economic conditions, banks are going through their accounts and closing ones that have been dormant. There is no formula to how they are doing this, but I have heard reports of banks closing credit cards for accounts that haven’t been used for over a year. Some others have reported that banks where they have 2 or more cards are closing one of the cards. Credit card companies have every right to close your account, but they usually do so without any warning to you. By the time you find out what happened, it is too late.

If you want to avoid an account closure for those cards that are extending the length of your credit history, I would reccommend using the card at least once every 6 months. Just use it at the store for something small or buy a tank of gas then pay it off right away. Some people might say once a year is good enough, but these days banks are scrambling to get an accurate picture of their bottom lines, so closing rarely used accounts is one way to put their arms around their total liability.

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