About OptionsXpress

The first thing you need to understand about OptionsXpress is the lack of the “e”. It is not OptionseXpress, but rather OptionsXpress. However they were smart enough to purchase both domains, so it you mispell it, no worries you will still get there. They were founded in February 2000 and are based out of Chicago, IL. They have been named Best Online Broker by Barron’s in four of the last five years.

OptionsXpress is a full service broker, meaning they allow you to trade stocks, mutual funds, options, open IRA’s, etc. OptionsXpress however focuses their sevices on options trading. So their commissions are based around options and the number of contracts that you buy or sell. For example, their commission to buy 10 contracts is only $15. Most brokerages charge a flat commission then $.50 – $1.00 extra per contract. If you tend to deal in a lot of contracts that can get very pricey!!!

They are a public traded company, trading under the OXPS symbol. They are SIPC insured, but they also have additional insurance that goes above and beyond that limit to cover a maximum limit of $24,500,000 per customer, $900,000 of that can be cash. So it is safe to say that your money isn’t at risk with them.

Account Features:

OptionsXpress has institued a new symbol format for identifying option contracts. This was very helpful for me as I trade a lot of covered calls. So I need to see the underlying stock as well as the associated call written on it easily. Here is a small sample of what I am talking about. (the red text is what I added)

Notice that their option symbols are prefixed with a period. They also order everything by the underlying stocl, so I can easily see what options/covered calls I have tied to which stocks. When you start to deal with tens of stocks and multiple calls on each, trust me, this makes things very easy to understand. This is important since you don’t want to get yourself in a “naked position” by selling a call on a security that is already open.

OptionsXpress has a fast execution time. In the begining when I signed up they had 10 free trades, so I used a few of them to purchase stocks with a limit order lower than the current stock price. Those trades executed immediately after I clicked the “submit order” button. I also monitored limit orders that were slightly above the current tradking price and those as well executed as soon as the “bid” price was the same as my limit price. I have been very happy with the speed at which my trades have been completed.

They offer an ACH feature where you can link a checking account to your OptionsXpress account and move money in and out for free. The ACH takes one day if you submit the request before 3:30PM EST the same day. There is a 2 day hold on the money once it is transfered. A few times their customer service department has made the money available the same day of the transfer. They sent me an email letting me know so I could trade with that money the same day. I was pleasantly surprised that they did that. To set up your linked account you just add your account number and routing number on their ACH setup page. They do a deposit into your account which you need to verify the amount. Once that is done your linked account is set up. No sending in voided checks, no faxing SSN’s or your signature to anyone, very easy!

They also have a Perodic ACH setup, where you can have them deduct money out of your linked account on a regular schedule. This is great if you want to build up your trading account over time automatically. Not many brokerages offer this. Most places you need to initiate each and every request. I love this feature!

Training & Education

They offer a ridiculous amount of training and education. So much that I don’t think I have the time to even cover half of it. This is good if you are trying to get into the market and want to understand how options, futures, bonds, ETF’s and even stocks work. They even have a virtual trading account where you can trade with fake money to see how your trades would have played out had you been trading for real. This is a great tool for those of you wanting to feel comfortable with stocks and options prior to invesitng your own money!

Customer Service

I have never had to deal with their customer services. I make abount 10-15 trades a month with OptionsXpress and so far everything has worked out. Other than the times they emailed me about making my ACH transfers available sooner, that has been the extend I had to deal with them. I did try calling their customer service line to see how long it would take to get to a person and it only took 28 seconds. This is pretty good considering I called around 9am EST on a Monday morning when I am sure things are very busy around there. There is also an online chat feature available Monday through Friday during normal trading hours.

So that is my long winded review for OptionsXpress. Also not that there is a $100 promo going on with them if you are interested. Check out the OptionsXpress Promo page for more details.

Also as always, please share your experiences on OptionsXpress with my by adding a comment below.

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Fidelity Investments Rewards Visa Signature Card with WorldPoints Rewards. The Fidelity Visa card earns a flat 1.5% cash back on all purchases.

How it works is that the card earns points based on purchases. You get one point per dollar. But when you redeeem the points to your Fidelity Account, you get $75 for 5000 points which equates to a 1.5% cash back return.

Don’t have a Fidelity account, Here is a way to get $100 when opening one. The basic Fidelity account is free and there are no fees. When you have accumulated 5000 points in your account, you can select the “Investment Rewards” option, enter your Fidelity Account number, and then in 5 days the $75 will be transfered into your account. At this point you can either transfer it to your bank account, invest it, or put it wherever you want. You can use the money immediately.

If you don’t want a Fidleity account then you can redeem the points for other rewards based on the World Perks rewards program. The rewards are unlimited, unlike other cards that cap your rewards at a certain amount per year.

I currently use my American Express Blue Cash Card for all my purchases, but when they don’t take American Express I use the Fidelity Visa card. They have a easy to use online interface to pay bills and review charges. Another cool feature that they have is that they show you pending charges as soon as your card it swiped. So you can see up to the minute activity on your card. Most credit cards only show posted charges which can ususally appear 2-3 days after you used the card.

This card, like most today, has no annual fee or random charges. If you are looking for a constant decent cash back rate and no limits, Apply for the Fidelity Rewards Visa!

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Tradeking was founded in December 2005. TradeKing’s founders include the original management team from SureTrade Inc. I used to use SureTrade prior to them being sold to Quick & Reilly. SureTrade back then was a pioneer in cheaper trades. I remember they offered all trades for $7.95. This alone was enough to make me feel secure about their operation. Anyone can create a online brokerage site, but to have spun off a successful discount brokerage site in the past, that makes me secure in giving them my money.

Commission and Fees:
Tradeking has one of the lowest commissions for an online stock broker out there. All trades are $4.95. This includes limit orders as well. A few brokers out there charge extra for limit orders, which is what most people use, so it is nice to see Tradeking have one flat fee for all trades. Stock Options are $4.95 plus $.65 for each option contract. So for example if you bought or sold 2 option contract2 it would cost you $6.25 ( $4.95 + 2 ($.65)). There are no minimum opening balances, and also no maintenance or inactivity fees to worry about, another difference between them and places like Etrade which hit you with an inactivity fee every quarter.

Dividend Reinvestment:
This is another service that differentiates Tradeking from the other guys. They offer free automatic dividend reinvestment, with the ability to purchase fractional shares. If you are a dividend investor you can see the value here. No more trying to find a place to invest that dividend. Just role it back into the same stock for free. The setting is configurable for all your stock holdings, or just specific ones.

Customer Service:
They offer a few ways to contact their customer service department.

• Online Chat (Available 8am – 6pm EST, Monday – Friday)
• Email – service@tradeking.com
• Telephone – 877.495.5464

I only had to contact their service department one time, which I did via telephone and was speaking to an agent in less than 4 minutes. TradeKing ranked fourth out of 12 firms, ahead of E*Trade , OptionsHouse, and TD Ameritrade, and significantly higher than OptionsXpress and Scottrade in a review of online brokers’ customer service centers performed by Kiplinger and ranked #1 by SmartMoney.

Automated Funds Transfer:
Tradeking allows you to link up a checking account to transfer money in and out of your account via ACH deposits and withdrawals. One thing to note is that ACH deposits are subject to a trading hold of 5 business days and cannot be withdrawn for 10 business days.

Trading Interface:
Tradekings menu’s and Trading Interface is very straightforward and very responsive. I have read many reviews of people complaining about trade lag time, but I have yet to experience this in the long while I have been using my account. I am an avid options trader and their options trading interface is one of the simpler interfaces I have seen which is good for the beginning option trader.

Cash Account:
Like all online brokers, uninvested money in your account earns minimal interest. Tradeking has a Money Market sweep option that will get you earning around 1% (this will change based on market conditions) interest. All you need to do is email them after you open an account asking them to enable the money market sweep for your account. When I signed up for the account 2 years ago the rate was at 4%, so it will move with the market.

Overall Tradeking has served me well and I am very happy with the service. Short of the long transfer times for new deposits, Tradeking gives me everything I need to be a successful investor. I definetly recomend them to anyone looking to start investing online. And with all the cheap stocks available today, now is definetly the time to get going!

Currently there is a $50 Tradeking promo code bonus available. Click here HERE for more detail.

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T-Mobile’s new HotSpot@Home Talk Forever Home will launch next week. You can read my earlier post for the details of the service, but in a nutshell, it is home telephone service. You install a wireless router which allows you to plug telehpones into it. You then have home service that uses your broadband connection. The router will allow you up to 2 phone lines. Each line will run $10 added onto your wireless plan that will get you unlimited calling in the US.

This is not bad if you currently have a wireless plan of $39.99 or greater through T-mobile which is a requirement to get the service. Right now Vonage costs $19.99, so this could replace Vonage or your current telephone service for only $10 a month. I am definetly going to sign up for this. Right now I currently use T-Mobile HotSpot@Home Talk Forever Mobile service that gets me free calls through my cell phone when using my broadband connerction. So pretty soon ALL my calls from home will be free.

T-mobile has become a pioneer with offering free calls through your high speed internet connection. I sure hope these services take off since quality has been great and you can’t beat the price.

Keep checking this HotSpot @Home Talk Forever Home Site for details on the launch if you are interested in the service.

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There are some neat features like larger attachment size, more filters, etc, but the best feature is the Disposable Email Addresses. Disposable Email Addresses are just what they sound like, email addresses that you can throw away when you want.

Say for example my email address is: [username]@yahoo.com. I don’t want this to get on any spam lists otherwise I will be receiving spam forever! Yahoo Mail Plus lets you select a keyword, and then create multiple address off of it that forward mail sent to them to your main account.

For example if I choose the keyword [keyword], then I all the address I would create would have that key word as a prefix, you just choose the word after the prefix:

[keyword]-mail@yahoo.com
[keyword]-shopping@yahoo.com
[keyword]-amazon@yahoo.com
[keyword]-[....]@yahoo.com
All of the above would forward to my main account [username]@yahoo.com.

The neat thing about this is once you start seeing spam coming to one of these address, you can just delete it and no more spam. I use a disposable address for each specific account I have do I can easly filter emails and put them in their corresponding folders. You can also send outbound email with a disposable addess as your return address so that you don’t have to disclose your real email address.

Currently Yahoo only charges $19,95 per year for Mail Plus, I would be willing to pay up to $100 / year for this feature since it keeps my mailbox clean. (I hope Yahoo doesn’t read this!).

I can’t tell you how much I love this feature and how it helps me stay organized. I don’t think I will be leaving my Yahoo Mail Plus email account anytime soon!

Want more? Get it withYahoo! Mail Plus.

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I have been using my Kindle for about 2 weeks so I thought I would take the time to write a review. I must say that it took me only a few hours to totally fall in love with it.

The size is very appropriate for reading and I can read with only one hand since I use a thumb to press the next page button. It is so compact that I can take it anywhere I think I may have some free time to read, like when waiting for a hair cut, or on the train on the way to work.

The books can be wirelessly downloaded. You pay for the cost of the book, but there are no cellular/wireless fees. The Kindle uses current cell phone technology for free. You just simply look up the name of the book that you want, and click buy. Your amazon account is automatically charged for the price of the book. The majority of the books, including New York Times Best Sellers and New Releases are $9.99 or less. So this is still competitive as a regular paper back book, but the kindle can hold many of them at a time. and you can bookmark the page on each book, so that you always know where you left off. No more searching through chapters trying to find where you stopped.

In terms of actually reading off the Kindle, the one-handed reading, the overall size of the reader, the sharp text and the variable font size all work together to make the experience while reading just as easy as with a book. I used the largest font size when I had the reader propped up on the treadmill. I was never able to read a book while on the treadmill since page turning was always an issue, but I have seemed to solve that problem. When you are looking at the screen, it doesn’t feel like the normal computer screen, it was very cleverly designed to make it feel like a book page with text on it. So you don’t feel that eystrain that you do when using your PC for 4 hours.

The battery life is very good. I am able to go several days without needing to charge. Charge time is very fast, in an hour or two the Kindle gets a full charge but I can still read for an entire evening on a very low indicator.

The Kindle also plays MP3’s, so if you take your Kindle everywhere then you also have an MP3 player. There are not many playback features yet as you can only play your MP3s randomly, but I hear those are in the works on a software update.

There are also other features where you can jot notes down, sign up for subscription content such as newspapers and magazines, etc. There is one very cool feature that I found myself using quite a bit, which is called Kindle NowNow. With NowNow uou pose a question and hit submit, similiar to a google search. Within a few minutes, you start to receive responses on the Kindle. This is very cool since you can be anywhere and ask a question and get many answers all for free.

Other than the NowNow feature, I currently only use it for book reading, which is what it really was designed for. There are some differences for example if you subscribe to a newspaper, you don’t see the images or any graphics, so if are a visual person the Kindle may not be for you, but in terms of book reading, I love it.

Ok, so the Amazon Kindle is somewhat of a luxury purchase as it is close to $400, but look at it this way, I am saving money on books as some of the selections come in under what the current prices are. I am also saving storage space, since my book collection is no longer requiring more book cases to stock it. And in the end, I guess I am saving some trees right?

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Well not much new to report, and that is good news! All 37 loans are still current, and I was able to pick up another $50 loan (Credit Rating: AA @ 11.00%) with payments from the outstanding loans. This puts me now at 38 loans with an average interest rate of 13.01% One of my loans is also being paid off, so should have enough in my account to pick up another $50 loan. I think I am going to go a little riskier this time to increase my overall loan percentage. One of the loans went late last week, but then was paid up in a few days, so I received a late payment fee of $.03. That loan was an AA Credit Rating, so I assume he just forgot to pay it. I’ll definitely take the late payment!!

One thing to remember is that if you decided to get involved in lending on Prosper, make sure as soon as your account reaches $50 (minimum loan amount) you bid on another loan as the prosper account does not pay interest on the cash balance in your account. To keep that loan interest rate up there you need to keep all your money into loans.

So far things are going well and I hope it continues this way. Only time will tell what a possible recession my do to my loans, but as I said before this was throw away money for me, as had I invested it the stock market, I would have lost it all!

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After installing, I noticed that it gave me all the shortcuts for the Yahoo! sites I usually use, such as Mail, Calendar, Yellow Pages, etc. It is configurable to add almost any page that Yahoo has. You can also create your own buttons as well. I also liked the fact that I can see if I have new mail just by looking at the tool bar.

I then started to look at the Bookmarks function. It was very straight forward to add bookmarks and bookmark folders. You just click “Save This Page” and a little pop-up asks you where in your bookmark folders you want to save it. And that is it.

So I spent 15 minutes moving all my bookmarks from IE into Yahoo. I then installed the Yahoo Toolbar on my work pc. And sure enough all my bookmarks were there.  Another great feature is that if you ever use another PC where the toolbar isn’t installed, such as a public pc at an internet cafe or something, you can go to http://bookmarks.yahoo.com to have access to all your bookmarks. (You need to sign up for a Yahoo account to store bookmarks on their server).

This is a time saver for me since I no longer have to go back and forth between PC’s to sync bookmarks. I also think Google has a feature like this on their toolbar, but I prefer Yahoo’s since I get the new mail alerts for my email account. I am not sure how long features like this have been around and I am kind of amazed that I never realized it. Simple things like this can make my day so much easier since I spend most of it on the internet for work.

For those of you that use the Firefox browser, Yahoo also has a version of the Yahoo! Toolbar for Firefox.

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Dental Insurance seems to be more of a luxury these days as more and more employers don’t offer it. My current place of work only offers health insurance to keep costs low, so I finally decided to start looking around of some Dental Insurance on my own as we have been too lucky with no dental issues and I expect the other shoe to drop soon. Obviously it is not as important as health insurance, but in the end it is nice to know you have some sort of protection if needed.

Geez, where to start? There has to be over 10,000 ads and scams out there regarding Dental Insurance. Everywhere you go on the internet you see  Dental Insurance ads. Most of them don’t look legit, so I thought I would share my personal exprerience with you. I stumbled upon DentalPlans.com. They seemed to be legit enough from the look of their website so I thought I would see what they had to offer. It was comforting to see that they had some bigger name plans from GE and Aetna, rather than fly by night shops I have never heard of that would disappear the day before your root canal.

Since I am married with a baby on the way I needed to look for Family Dental Plans. Now don’t forget that since you are getting the insurance your self it is gonna cost you a bit more, especially if you are needing family coverage. There is still going to be out of pocket costs, but the idea is to minimize them as much as possible. My main goal was to find a plan that picks up 6 month checkups. Since we both get 2 a year I wanted to make sure that we weren’t paying more out of pocket just for the simple exams.

After going through pretty much all the plans, we decided on GE Wellness Plan (Dental Only). This plan costs $159.95 per year for a family. It covers 6 month checkups up to $43 per visit. So for two people twice a year, the plan will already pay for itself. We will just need to pay for the cleanings which run about $60 per adult which are discounted from $83 per the plan. So there is still some cost involved, but at least it isn’t full price and is managable. Like with health insurance, the real savings come in when you need major dental work done, which thankfully neither of us have needed, knock on wood.

The whole process using DentalPlans.com was pretty painless. You don’t need to sign up to register to see pricing. You just sign up when you are ready to enroll in a plan. I did call their 800 number since I had a few questions and they were very helpful and courteous ( a rarity these days when dealing with health-care folks!!!).

I did notice that they currently are having a promotion that if you use the coupon code: SELECT you will get 10% off of any plan. Unfortunately I signed up before this promo, but just having the security of dental insurance is good enough for me. Now all I need to do is get all my teeth knocked out!

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Since the URGE Music Store has been purchased by Rhapsody I have been looking for a new outlet to buy my music. URGE was alright, but it required a software install into Windows Media Player. URGE also used DRM (Digital Rights Management), so I could not play the songs anywhere other than my PC I downloaded them on. There might have been a way to do this by copying the licenses but I could never figure it out.

Fast forward to today. I decided that in my next music store, I wasn’t going to go with a site that had DRM or that required me to install software. I have 3 pc’s and a WindowsMobile Smart phone, I want to play the same song on all 4 devices easily.

After some research I decided to check out the Amazon MP3 Music Store

Bingo! I think I found what I was looking for:

• No DRM!
• No software to install (there is an application you can install if you want easier music management, but it is not required. You essentially just download the raw .mp3 file)
• Most all songs are .89 or .99
• Large selection of artists (They are not focused on just Pop or Rap)

I have been using the Amazon MP3 Music Store for a few weeks and am very satisfied. Also, since I buy from Amazon regularly I am not concerned with site security and know they have a good customer service team in place to help me with any issues.

This is not really a “Saving Money” post, but I have been able to save time by not having to burn a DRM song to a CD then RIP it back off just to get the song to play on other machines. Hey, didn’t someone say TIME=MONEY?

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