About Me 0015: manage personal finances

The theory is simple: "If you don't have the money, don't charge it. Try to leave your credit card at home and only use it to pay bills," advises April Lewis, director of education for Consolidated Credit Counseling Services. Then immediately pay off your credit-card balance. As for old credit-card debt, sit down and commit to paper a plan for paying them off. Go for a quick hit, like paying off the smallest balance first, or decide to take on the highest rate card first. Get the job done.

Here's a second tip: Be proactive about managing your credit. Call up your lender and ask it to lower your interest rate. Usually, lenders will lower callers' rates by 2% to 3%, says Scott Gamm, founder of HelpSaveMyDollars.com. Also check your credit report. You can check your credit for free at annualcreditreport.com, for example. If you see mistakes, contact the credit agencies and get those mistakes corrected. If errors are dragging down your score, eliminating them can boost it to where it belongs and make you eligible for better rates.

2. Think automation

Free online banking tools can make it easier to manage your finances with less work. To help grow your savings, for example, you can schedule regular transfers from your checking account. Manisha Thakor, author of Get Financially Naked: How to Talk Money With Your Honey, suggests setting up the transfer of a set amount of money into your savings account every pay day.

Also automate recurring bill payments so you never miss a due date or pay a late fee, which sends money down the drain. Even without late fees, timely payments are key: 35% of your credit score is based on your ability to make payments on time. If you sign up for automatic payments, however, make sure to check your monthly bills for errors. One other caveat: "Make sure you have enough cushion in your checking account to avoid any overdrafts" before setting up auto-payments, money coach Lora Sasiela says.

LaunchBox Digital, a VC firm specializing in angel, seed, and early stage investments, just wrapped up its third annual 12-week startup mentoring program. Similar to Y Combinator and TechStars, LaunchBox invests seed capital of $20,000 into startup teams and provides them with 12 weeks of education, mentorship, and access to advisers. The following 7 LaunchBox10 companies are graduating from this year’s program and will be going live as part of LaunchBox Demo Day, where the companies will present their businesses to potential investors and strategic partners.

Without further ado, here are the graduates:

CityPockets (Crunchbase profile): Today, we live in the world of the Groupon clone, and thanks to the Google-shunning colossus, “daily deal” websites now litter the Web. These sites have been a big hit among mom and pop shops and small businesses because they can be such an effective way to attract new, local customers. The problem for these merchants, however, has been converting new customers into loyal, repeat visitors. According to LaunchBox, less than 15% of “deal jumpers” return to the same merchant again without another deal offer. On the whole, these merchants struggle to retain the influx of new customers, failing to take the steps to establish that critical, lasting relationship with the consumer.

CityPockets.com is a real-time, self-serve merchant CRM platform that aims to address customer retention issues by allowing merchants to more easily capture user contact info and to offer repeat discounts. In addition, the platform empowers merchants to manage gaps in supply and demand by sending out time-sensitive, limited-quantity offers whenever it makes sense for their businesses. Customers opt-in to follow their favorite merchants via CityPockets’ web and mobile apps.

Businesses interested in being part of the CityPockets Merchant Network can sign up here, and Daily Deal users can sign up at CityPockets.com to access and keep track of all voucher purchases from across popular Daily Deal sites on a single platform, and eventually receive more offers from relevant merchants of their choice.

FiscalPie (Crunchbase profile): FiscalPie breaks down the barrier between personal finance and social networks by providing users with Facebook applications that enable users to compare their finances with others and, in turn, learn how to make more educated financial decisions. One such FiscalPie application, “Retire Where?” shows you which cities you’ll be able to afford in retirement and allows you to compare your it with the future location of your friends.

FiscalPie works to make the myriad sources of financial information on the Web more reflective of your own specific circumstances—while keeping your information private —by creating an anonymous network of people that share similar financial profiles. Until the individual truly becomes part of the conversation, financial information has little significance. FiscalPie is hoping to start that dialog—socially.

HEALTHeME (Crunchbase profile): HEALTHeME delivers treatments that empower those struggling with weight, stress, and mood issues to better manage their health via the web and their mobile phone. The HEALTHeME platform combines clinical treatments and artificial intelligence to create customized behavior modification plans based on users’ lifestyles, health goals, and personality type. HEALTHeME then leverages real-time coaching, social networks and user’s healthcare providers to offer a truly personalized user experience. Would love to see an app for this, too.

Keona Health (Crunchbase profile): Keona Health is a company that optimizes admissions for primary care providers, increasing both productivity and cost savings. Keona’s Patient Decision Support system empowers patients with instant, personalized advice that aims to resolve up to 10% of patient cases at home. Triage nurses review each case, but with the goal of being 5 times faster and with more comprehensive safety checks than before. As a result of the greater emphasis on in-home consultation, when patients need to travel into the office to see a doctor, they should find reduced delays and wait times.

Keona has partnered with UNC and Duke to develop a decision engine that has already analyzed over 1,000 real medical records, and UNC Campus Health Services is acting as Keona’s first beta customer. During 2011, Keona Health plans to expand to several additional universities.

Leaguescape (Crunchbase profile): Leaguescape is a new platform for fantasy sports that combines social gaming and betting and allows you to collect all your fantasy sports leagues in one place. Like the Pokerstars or Full Tilt Poker of fantasy sports, Leaguescape allows fantasy sports enthusiasts to manage and bet on their season leagues and get their daily fix of fantasy sports with a variety of game offerings that enable users to draft, watch, and win on a daily basis.

Drawing on the online poker model, Leaguescape provides all things a fantasy sports bettor could need, including a variety of gaming types, rewards, and promotions.

Slipstream (Crunchbase profile): The likelihood is that your Twitter stream is an unfavorable mix of a few things you care about and a lot you don’t. You don’t want to miss out on important news and events, but you don’t have time to read everything. Slipstream wants to rid your stream of irrelevant Tweets.

Today, Slipstream launched its third prototype, a Chrome extension that lets you hide tweets on Twitter.com. It works seamlessly to help you get rid of things like Foursquare checkins, paper.li mentions, or when people you’re following start live-tweeting events. Gonezo. Simply click the “Hide” link that Slipstream adds to the end of every tweet and begin filtering your stream. It’s that easy.

Spring Metrics (Crunchbase profile): Spring Metrics helps you grow your online business by providing a deeper understanding of your customers and how they interact with your website. Spring Metrics seeks to make complex web analytics more friendly and digestible for marketers and e-commerce professionals who don’t want to wrestle with the complexity of traditional analytics products.

With an easy-to-use interface that requires no coding knowledge, Spring Metrics eliminates the hassle of creating conversion funnels and goals. The company’s real-time dashboard offers an array of conversion-oriented metrics, and the “Insight Engine” unearths actionable patterns in the data—patterns aimed at helping turn more visitors into paying customers.

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Thursday, 13 January 2011

manage personal finances

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