Why my credit card # gets stolen so often

So, in my post last month about my fifth run-in with fraudulent charges on a credit card (two different cards, not five on one), a number of commenters expressed shock that I could possibly be hit so many times. Typical response: "How can this be happening so often? I never had to deal with this situation."

Why do I get nailed so frequently? (First time was in maybe 2002? I'm averaging just under once a year, I think.) Here's my best guess:

-Two out of the five times, my ATM card got hacked: Someone made a fake card and physically withdrew cash from my checking account. This means they not only had the account number, they had my PIN -- which, as I think I've mentioned previously, absolutely no one else on Earth knows, not even my spouse. (I don't know his PIN, either. Neither of us withdraws cash from the others' checking account.)

In those cases, I strongly suspect I used a dodgy ATM. PINs have also been stolen from the systems of retailers that allow PIN-based debit transactions, but I do that very rarely. On the other hand, in the seven or so years I was with NetBank, I often used ATMs in random delis. I'm cautious about avoiding shoulder surfing, and techie enough to likely notice an obvious skimming device, but New York City has been home to several crime rings using internal skimmers and backdoor software on unrelated, "white label" ATMs -- the kind I used probably 60 times a year. I try to be disciplined about using bank ATMs, but ... I am weak. Especially when I was with NetBank and paid the upfront withdraw fee every time I needed cash (since NetBank had no NYC ATMs), I tended to simply use whatever was closest. Which means I probably got nailed on a corrupted ATM.

-On the other hand, three of the five fraud incidents I've had were "classic" cases, where someone only had my credit card number (not the physical card; every time, it's been in my possession the whole time I was being ripped off). So why did I get hit three times in 10 or so years, when other people go decades without ever getting nailed?

I have two theories. First, sheer statistical probability. I use my credit card constantly - literally, multiple times in an average day. I probably run 500 transactions a year through my primary card, my Amex. (I pay it off each month. I just prefer it to cash -- and hey, rewards points!) I don't know what "average" credit-card usage is, but my count has got to be on the high end. Simply by using my card so much, I'm increasing the opportunities for someone to steal the number.

Second: I go to restaurants a lot - the #1 place credit-card data gets stolen. Also, I live in NYC. If you want to set up shop stealing credit-card info, a big city with a police department unlikely to pay attention to small financial crimes is a pretty good place to do it.

So, in summary: I think I get hit so frequently through a combination of high exposure and just sheer bad luck. I can and should avoid shonky ATMs, but on the classic-fraud cases where my numbers get stolen, I simply don't think there's much I can do to prevent it.

Here's the real kicker: This week, as I finally got everything refunded from my Amex fraud, David got hit. On his Citibank debit card. To the tune of $1,000 or so in train tickets around Italy. It's the second time he's been hit (in the eight years he's had this bank account) -- and since it's not a credit card, this came straight out of his checking account. He's now waiting for the paperwork from Citibank to dispute the charges and start getting a refund processed.

Maybe we really should start stuffing our cash under a damn mattress.

The annual identity theft

Some people can't hang onto romantic partners for more than a few months. Me, I can't hang onto credit card numbers. Just once, I would like to have a card that actually hits its expiration date. Instead, I end up replacing my credit and ATM cards every year or so -- because the damn numbers get stolen. Repeatedly.

This time, I was so slammed at work I overlooked the problem for two days. At the end of March, an email popped up in my inbox, from American Express: "Alert: Possible Fraud Activity." The email listed a "possible suspicious charge": "On 03/31/08 for $24 at EQUIVA/SHELL POS."

Oh hell NOT AGAIN! my very tired and overcluttered-with-work brain yelped. Then my brain pulled a trick it doesn't usually do: it decided it was not equipped to deal with Yet Another Crisis, and it shunted the Amex email off to the darkest recesses of my mental filing cabinet. Figuring I'd deal with the Amex email Sometime Later, I instead forgot about it entirely. For two whole days. Until another friendly "Possible Fraud Alert" email popped up, and my brain grudgingly conceded that all right, there might be a situation here that should be dealt with. The brain then sulked off into a corner while I wearily picked up the phone to talk with Amex about what strange charges were hitting my card.

Half an hour later, it became clear that someone was having a fun time in Florida with my plastic. $220 or so in charges made it onto my statement; I gather there were more in the queue Amex caught before they posted. Sample highlight: $53.12 at a Fort Lauderdale McDonald's. I'm not sure which surprises me more - that McDonald's takes plastic (and Amex, even?), or that it's possible to spend $53 at McDonald's in one go.

Once again, this is a case of my numbers getting loose without my plastic ever leaving my possession: my card was safe in my wallet the whole time this nonsense was going down.

Once again, I'm going through the replacement dance. Amex cancelled my card and overnighted me a new one. I have at least five monthly payments that autobill to the card, and it's my one-click default payment method at half-a-dozen online retailers; I get to go spend a few hours changing all those settings. Le sigh. Only silver lining: When my ATM card gets hacked, I have to go file police reports. Amex does not require police reports.

Still. This is now Time #5 for me on the Financial Fraud Merry-Go-Round, the third just in the time I've been keeping Birds & Bills. (I see I managed to go all of 2007 without getting hit. Clearly some deity in charge of Giving Stacy Financial Grief was on sabbatical.) Anyone know what the Guinness Book record is?

Oh the irony

Amazon appears to have a new widget where it invites you to "Treat Yourself." It's like it's sitting there whispering "C'mon, whip out the plastic, do some impulse buying ... you know you want to ..."

So what book from my wish list (which I basically use to bookmark things) is it recommending I splurge and buy? Maxed Out: Hard Times, Easy Credit and the Era of Predatory Lenders.

This is an odd little wrinkle

One of the posts I've been drafting in my head for a bit and need to research further is about whether it would be advantageous for me to roll my old 401(k) into an IRA, rather than rolling it straight into my new 401(k). But a bit of weirdness popped up today that has me wondering if I should just leave the thing exactly where it is.

My old company had a five-year vesting schedule for its 401(k) match: It vested 20 per year. I quit in December, after about 20 months of working there. My 401(k) was, of course, only 20 percent vested. I figured I'd be walking away from the other 80 percent of the company's match - not fun, but I wanted the new job, and $2k in unvested 401(k) money wasn't really a serious factor in my decision about whether or not I should leave.

Now, one of my friends mentioned that when she left one of her past jobs, her 401(k) kept vesting. Every year, another chuck moved into the vested category, and when she finally moved the funds years later, she got everything - even the stuff that technically should never have vested, because she left the company prematurely.

I asked about this at OldCompany HR before I left: I walk away from my unvested 401(k) funds, right? Their answer: yes, of course.

Ok. Then why, when I checked my balance today, had another 20 percent vested? (My two-year anniversary would have been sometime in February.)

Is this a workflow breakdown? Did news of my termination not make it over to OldCompany's 401(k) provider (JP Morgan)? Is this going to keep happening every year, if I leave the 401(k) where it is?

I could call and ask these questions, of course, but that seems like poking the hornet's nest. But. Hmm. If the money will never vest (which is, I'm pretty sure, what should be happening), I want to move the account. If it is going to keep vesting, I should leave it. And, er, hope I'm not screwing up anything legally or ethically by not alerting either OldCompany or JP Morgan what's going on.

(And yes, I'm aware that posting on a public blog is not exactly a way to keep things subtle. I'm posting because I'm not really trying to hide this, and also because I'm curious about how common this phantom vesting is.)

Green shopping bags

The supermarket where I drop giant chunks of my paycheck, Whole Foods (in both my old and my new offices, there's one right next to the subway I take home), announced last month that it will stop releasing plastic bags. Starting in April, shoppers can bring their own bags, buy a 99c reusable one, or opt for paper.

Cynically, I wonder if the move is also going save Whole Foods money on buying bags. I just searched their SEC filings, and nothing is disclosed there -- so if the switch to "paper or pay" is going to be cheaper for them, they're not saying.

Being your standard-issue urban-liberal lazy-green mild-environmentally-guilt-stricken type, I'd long tried to switch to reusable bags. However, I fast hit a snag: I am incredibly forgetful. I could be walking out the door with the express purpose of going to the store to buy groceries and still manage to forget to take along one of the half-dozen reusable bags I'd bought over the years. And for impulse buys, forget it. I was managing to bring a reusable bag on about one shopping trip every eight weeks.

Until I came across the perfect thing for me, at the Union Square holiday craft market in December: Envirosax. These bags roll up and close with a snap, so you can stuff them in a backpack or purse, and they unfold to impressively large size -- I've stuffed gigantic grocery loads into mine. I've been road-testing my Envirosack for two months now, and so far, all good. It's rugged, hasn't torn, washes easily when I spill stuff on it, and fits easily into my purse, so I actually have it with me most of the time. About the trickiest thing I've encountered was mastering the fold-and-reroll trick to packing the bag back up, but I got the hang of it after a few tries.

Envirosax are $8.50 each on their website; I got mine for $13 or so, which means if you find it at a retailer near you, expect markup. (On the other hand, no shipping charges for buying locally.)

I'm not sure if BYO Bags really count as a frugality tip; most of the markets I shop at give you a 5c discount for bringing a reusable bag, but at that rate it'll take about 260 shopping tricks before I can claim my bag paid for itself. I suspect this is like buying a hybrid car: you can tell yourself the lower gas costs are worth the higher upfront expense, but really, it's a wash. Except that it'll help appease your nagging inner Al Gore voice, which is all good.

Envirosax is, of course, not the only company touting easily transportable reusable bags. Baggu Bags is also making inroads. Their bags fold up into a pouch. (I would lose the pouch. And probably fight with the bag trying to get it folded correctly and stuffed back in. The best part of the Envirosack, for me, is that it's one piece; the snap-rollup tie is built in.) Know of others? Tout 'em here.

(As a reminder, Birds & Bills doesn't take advertising; any products mentioned are things I legitimately bought. No ethics were harmed in the making of this blogpost.)

Stimulating things

Since I'm editing and occasionally writing coverage of the stimulus deal, I suppose I ought to stay Switzerlandish in my commentary on it. So. Er. $600 rebates. Hooray, the economy is saved?

When my check arrives, I'm going to have to be one of those naughty consumers who socks it away into savings or paying down debt, since I've already done some premature economic stimulating.

A few weeks back I went to Seattle with my sister, who had never been there. In addition to visiting friends, we had two express purposes for the trip: eat at the planet's best sushi restaurant (I have been to sushi restaurants on Tokyo; this one still wins - how can it not, with that URL!?) and go see a gallery show by one of my favourite artists. My intention was just to look, of course. It had to be - most of his paintings are priced around what my college education cost. But ... the gallery had prints ... and I have this theory that art you love is one of those things you never regret purchasing ...

So, um. I have a print now. Yay! And my art budget for the entire year is officially blown. Good thing The Planet's Best Sushi is so reasonably priced.

Tax prep: Giving Tango a try

Longtime Birds & Bills readers will recall that I have absolutely no loyalty when it comes to tax prep -- I'll use whatever program is cheapest and at least minimally user friendly. I used TaxCut through college, switched to TaxAct for a few years, and gave TurboTax a spin last year.

This year, just as I was starting to idly troll through discounts and figure out what to use, David mentioned a Second Life promotion offering free codes to use H&R Block's tax software. I assumed he meant TaxCut, and said sure, if he can head over to H&R Block's island and snag me a code, I'd be thrilled to use it. (David plays Second Life. I just snark at it.)

The Second Life freebie promotion code (well, "freebie" in the sense that it cost 100 Linden dollars, which is about 12 cents in U.S. dollars) seems to have dried up, but David got one before it did. But it turned out it wasn't TaxCut H&R Block was pushing, it's Tango, an entirely new option. It's kind of the in-between product. For basic, no-nonsense tax prep software, there's TaxCut. Tango has a jazzier interface, a more informal presentation, and access to tax professionals 24/7 if you need it. And, of course, for the full-service option, H&R Block has its walk-in offices.

Tango's slicker approach comes with a steeper price tag: it's $70, vs. about $35 for TaxCut. What does the extra cash buy you? Aside from on-call tax advice if you need it, it's paying for attitude. The Tango website gives you a pretty good idea what you're in for: it has a blog, and sells its multiplatform approach with the line "windows, apples, penguins - we love u."

I can see the Tango approach being useful for young and intimidated tax filers, which seems to be the demographic it's aiming at. It definitely has the Web 2.0-vibe. I couldn't decide whether I felt amused or condescended to by the quippy little messages it pops up throughout the prep process. Filling out my personal information at the start generated a bubble on the side saying, "This is kind of like when your aunt asks you when you're going to have children at Thanksgiving, isn't it?"

Like all version-one products, Tango is breakable. Because my company partially funded my HSA, they ticked a little box in 12c on the W2 saying they had. Tango popped up a note saying that meant I needed to file Form 8889, which it does not support. End message. Er? So does that mean I can't use Tango at all? Does it mean I need to file the form separately myself, if I completed the process with Tango?

I suppose this would have been the time to test out Tango's on-call tax-prep help, but I opted to forge on and deal with the problem later. Which ended up being a sound decision, because when I finished and was ready to file and put in my little Second Life code ... it was invalid. I tried a few times. Still invalid. Arugh.

So, Plan B. TaxAct apparently missed me last year. It sent an email Jan. 30 offering 30 percent off if I came back. Back I went, to reenter all the information I had already plowed into Tango. Luckily, my taxes are fairly straightforward, despite the vast pile of forms I seem to have every year (this time, it was 11, not counting charity receipts - three W-2s, an overpayment form from NY state, an interest statement from my bank, tuition and student loan interest statements, and several 1099s). About an hour later, my taxes were done - and, shock of shocks, the discount thingie worked, as last year's TurboTax discount totally failed to. My state and federal return e-filing and prep cost a grand total of $11.90. And, I'll note, TaxAct had no problem with Form 8889.

Yay TaxAct! All done, rebate en route. (Yes, I loan the government money interest free every year. This is a deliberate calculation, because David and I are crap at saving. It is much better for us financially for us to not stress about it and instead get a giant wad back at the end of the year. Plus, when I freelance heavily as I did this year, I don't have to worry about owing money at the end; it just comes out of the refund cash we've already amassed.)

Last year's tax-time surprise was discovering that I itemize, something I assumed I'd never do until we had mortgage expenses to deduct. But our state and local taxes now exceed the standard deduction, so we itemize and deduct them. Living in NYC cost us around $11,000 in taxes this year. Ow. When I briefly whinged about it, David told me to shut up and calculate what the subway saves me on car expenses. Hrm. Point.

Anyway, this year's surprise was finding that I file a Schedule C. Possibly I have had to do this before, but I don't recall seeing it come up, and I'm pretty sure I've had other years where I filed my freelance 1099 income. But this time around, when I plugged 'em in, up came the "hi you run a business, tell us about it" forms. Now I too get bitten by that self-employment tax all my freelancer friends gripe about! Ok, my bite was all of $106, but. I sympathize, my comrades.

A rant about usurious long-distance pricing

I realise complaining about extortionate phone company pricing is like complaining about the sun rising each day, but -- ARUGH. I just got bit by pricing that has me very cranky at Verizon.

So, David is from Australia. At home, we have Verizon's international calling plan, where we pay $3 or whatnot a month and get a flat rate to call Australia of 14-cents-a-minute or thereabouts. Calling his mum's cell is slightly more expensive, 33 cents or so. Fine.

For Christmas, we went home to my Dad's. Dad has your standard no-frills Verizon package. I suggested David call his family to say hi, and told Dad we'd reimburse the cost. I figured it would be more than our discounted rate, but didn't think much about what it would actually be.

Just got the bill. 28 minute call. $105.56.

$3.77/minute.

Are they @^&%@^%@ kidding?

I am horked off, cranky as hell ... and realise I have no recourse. We made the call. I didn't ask about the rate. It is what it is. But RAR. Even more infuriatingly, there would have been no real way to find the rate in advance. I just spent half an hour banging on Verizon's website. If there's a way to find international calling costs, I can't excavate it. I eventually found a customer service number, and planned to call them and ask about the rate. Except they're closed weekends.

This sort of blatently abusive shit pisses me off. I am totally fine with paying a higher-per minute rate than I get under my discounted plan -- but I would like that rate to have some sane basis. It obviously does not cost Verzion $3 more per minute to provide me service. If I'd known that was the rate, I would have gone out and bought a damn prepaid card and saved $100 or so.

Grr. I guess there's nothing really I can do except remember from now on to never, ever, ever make an international call without a prepaid card, but does anyone know if there's a regulatory body I can at least send off a complaint at? BBB? FCC?

Sigh. I guess $100 is the price I pay to be reminded that phone companies are heinous bastions of usurious pricing that one must be ever-vigilant about.

Today's GRR award winner

I occasionally get unsolicited emails from people wanting to advertise on Birds & Bills. The site doesn't accept advertising, so while these emails are fruitless, they're generally slight mood-lifters -- it's reassuring to find out the site is on the radar and people read it, despite my woefully sporadic update schedule.

This week, though, I got an unsolicited pitch that had me reaching for the big spiky GRR bat. It's from a website called www.AboutYourMoney.co.uk. Let me let them speak for themselves.

We are currently seeking to put "sponsored reviews" of our website on the best financial blogs out there. We absolutely loved your blog so we wondered if we could write a feature review for it?

We would be doing the writing of course, so all you need to do is post it and get paid!

We'll pay you $65 for the privilege (paid by Paypal, straight after the blog post is up). This is dependent on the condition that the blog is not identified as a paid for review on your blog. We do not want you to disclose that in any way.

Blogs are not (generally; there are exceptions) journalism. Blogs are not and probably should not be held to the same standard as journalistic reports penned by staff writers. To my mind, they're more akin to piece written by topical freelancers, where conflicts-of-interest run rampant and all you can do is rely on everyone involved to exercise good judgment and be transparent about anything that should be disclosed.

But there is still a line between gray areas and straight-up unethical behavior. Undisclosed, paid commercial content masquerading as unbiased commentary is flat-out and unequivocally on the wrong side of it. Sadly, I see a few bloggers have taken the $65 bait. I'm putting this up in hopes it'll be found by anyone who comes across a post about
www.AboutYourMoney.co.uk and goes looking for info. Reputable sites don't need to resort to this kind of trickery.

(I might need to make GRR awards a tag. I see I have handed them out before.)

Never mind the deductible -- watch the back-end cap

This came in on the comments on my last HSA post:

One question: were there any hidden surprises? It always seems there's some hang-up with health insurance...

Don't I know it.

My year of HSAing was remarkably smooth, though it's hard to say whether that's because everything worked well or simply because I had no unexpected medical situations. Unlike 2006, 2007 was a totally routine year for me and my spouse: nothing but the usual doctors calls, our standard prescriptions, and an annual checkup. There wasn't (thank goodness) much opportunity for me to test out the insurance and trip over hidden catches.

The only surprise was how unexpectedly easy it was to push through the one claim I had. One of my HSA's little carrots was that it reimbursed 60 percent of the cost of my out-of-network annual physical -- before setting the deductible. No, I'm pretty sure this isn't common. It wasn't even something the PPO insurance with the same carrier offered. It was pretty clearly a "come try this nice HSA!" bribe.

So when I had my physical, I paid out of pocket, downloaded the "reimburse me" form, sent it off with the receipt ...and a few weeks later, received a check in the mail for the $160 I'd put in the claim for. It was startling. I don't recall ever actually getting a claim processed without some kind of catch and extended wrangle.

Overall, though, I think the best thing to keep in mind with an HSA and avoiding surprises is: watch the back-end costs, not the front-end ones. As I wrote when I first opted into the HSA:

The articles I've found about HSAs tend to focus on the up-front deductible when emphasizing how HSAs can end up costing you more. To me, the far more important number is on the back end: the annual out-of-pocket max. What's the most I might be out, if very bad things happened?

An HSA is, pretty much by definition, a low-premium, high-deductible option. If you have a medical situation, you will almost always pay more upfront than someone with traditional insurance would: You might be liable for $1,000 or so in costs before the insurance kicks in anything at all. That's a serious issue to consider when opting for an HSA: can you come up with the money, if you need to? Are you better off paying higher monthly premiums to avoid the potential shock of a big hit all at once, if something dire happens?

Frustrating as a sudden hit for $1,000 or more would be, few people would be catastrophically devastated by that. What would be devastating is a high out-of-pocket max payment: At what point does your insurance foot the whole bill?

My HSA had an out-of-pocket max of around $4,000/year, about the same as the carrier's traditional insurance carried. If I got hit by a bus and rang up $250,000 in hospital bills, I'd still be capped at $4k. I could live with that.

But if my HSA's out-of-pocket max had been an order of magnitude more than the traditional insurance's? Say, $40,000? I would never have done it.

Insurance companies can always argue the fine print, and you never really know how effective your coverage is until you have the unhappy situation of having to test it out. But you can minimize the chances of devastation by paying as much attention to the potential back-end costs as you do to the front-end deductible.

The gifting quandary

When I was a kid, Christmas was all about the presents. I mean, yes, the tree and decorations and family time were fun, but -- PRESENTS. I can still clearly remember the Christmas Eve I spent all night awake (I think I was eight or so? Maybe 10?) hoping like crazy that my parents had listened to my entreaties that I would be the most blissed-out kid in the universe if Santa coughed up a Petster robot cat. Happily, Santa did! Which only ramped up my campaign for a real kitty, but that's another story ...

The presents side of Christmas was still quite exciting when I was older but broke. In college and for my first few years out, I relied on Christmas to snag the kinds of indulgences I couldn't afford to buy myself and which my frugal Dad saved for the year's big holiday. My first digital camera was a Christmas gift, as was my iPod. I was always very grateful to be treated to such luxuries, and it made drafting Christmas lists (which my Dad always requests) easy.

But about four or five years ago, I stopped being broke. I'm hardly rolling in money, but I have enough cash flow now that if there's something I really want -- a book, a DVD, a not-stratospherically-priced electronic gizmo -- I just go get it.

This has rather complicated Christmas. There's very little in the way of material goods I actually want that I don't already have or can't easily get myself. (Within reason, I mean. The Big Purchase David and I really need to get organized about saving for, an apartment, is a bit out of Christmas list territory.)

More problematically, almost everyone I know is in the same boat.

Shopping for my Dad is the trickiest. He's the worst combination of traits, from a gift-giving perspective: well-off enough to procure anything gift-sized that he would want for himself, and a total minimalist. I clutter; I collect things. Dad does not. Extra things around my house are generally absorbed into the usual chaos. Extra things around Dad's house fester, drive him nuts, and eventually fall victim to a cleaning purge.

So what in the hell do you get for people who really don't need anything?

For most of my friends, I've taken the popular route through this problem: food or donations. There are very few people who won't appreciate interesting snacks or a meal out; buying birthday dinner has become a standard gift I give when the opportunity arises. I go the charity route for the holidays: I have a list of about 10 friends I make holiday donations on behalf of each year, and follow up with e-cards. (This year, my organizations were Heifer International, Donors Choose and Doctors Without Borders.) My favourite thing about doing donations is that it's a low-pressure gift, avoiding the awkward dance of "uh oh what if they get me something and I don't get them something or vice versa and ..." A charity donation is low-key and guaranteed to be useful.

But there will always be some people you have to get a physical thing for -- very close friends or family, spouse, and so on. And that is just tricky when people don't really need or want things.

I've basically resorted to three categories here: 1) things the person will love and didn't know existed; 2) things that are hard to find; and 3) art.

Category One is the obvious perfect thing for gifts. My sister managed to nail this one this year for me: she got me an AeroGrow indoor garden. I didn't know there was something that would let me grow herbs in a lightless NYC apartment. There is! I had no idea! Hooray!

Category Two is the tactic I usually take for David, who is a mediaphile who quests after all sorts of obscure things. One of my best holiday scores was probably the least expensive gift I've ever bought him: A D-Generation album he'd had when he was younger and never been able to find again. It took eight months of monitoring eBay Australia, but I found one -- for about $5.

Category Three is one I'm taking advantage of more and more frequently. Art is hard to buy for others -- tastes are tricky things to nail, and I only have about three people I'm confident enough of their likes and dislikes to chance it with. But it's also one of the surest ways to get something someone isn't expecting and will (hopefully) find intriguing. Etsy is fast becoming one of my go-to gift-shopping stops.

The only trouble with this approach is that it takes time. Which is why unexpected, hard-to-find or unique items make such great gifts -- they clearly illustrated that you thought ahead, considered your recipient's personality, and devoted time to the hunt. Knowing someone cares enough to do that is the best part.

But this year, sigh. My November and December vanished to job craziness; I literally had to schedule shopping windows weeks in advance. It was not one of my finest holiday gifting seasons.

But David seems happy with his wooden tennis racquet, my sister likes her autographed horse-race photo (the only gift I did manage a head-start on, and thank God the framer could do an incredibly quick turnaround), and my Dad liked the restaurant my sister found for his birthday (which falls the week before Christmas). Whew!

The end of my HSA

Whew.

Three days into a four-day break, my brain is finally starting to work again. Changing jobs without a day off in between was not one of my cleverest moves; I ended up leaving with an article still owed to old job (finally filed, yay!), scary amounts of information to absorb at new job, and all sorts of errands needing do be done in my scant free time. Like getting my first personal cell phone -- all my previous ones have been work cell phones. (That is a whole grumpy post unto itself.)

I'm now in the fun process of trying to wind up all my old work benefits accounts and start my new-job ones. It's amazing how much ends up being linked to a job: I've got to sort out my 401k, health care and mental health care coverage (separate providers from standard health care, at both old and new company), WageWorks commuter cash account (THANK GOD I will be free of WageWorks), ShareSave cash account, and my Health Savings Account.

Ah, my HSA.

My new company has amazing health care options. The cost is a flat percentage of my salary. To cover both me and David is 2% of my gross (just me would be a mere 1%)-- which ends up being only a bit more than I was paying at my old job to insure just me, and will save us more than $1,000 a year by letting us cancel his (more expensive) insurance. It also appears to be better coverage, even though it's the same provider I had before, Empire Blue Cross. Seems the new plan coughs up for more comprehensive coverage. Yay!

The new job also offers an HSA, but the cost is such a small fraction less than the traditional coverage that it isn't worth it. So, after one year of experimentation, I'm ending my voyage into these minimally charted health-care waters.

So how did it work out?

I opted for the HSA last year because its premiums were less than one-third what the premiums would have been for traditional insurance. My company's strange plan made it so that it was less expensive to do the HSA and go through the entire deductible than it would be to pay for regular premiums.

On that front, it was a success. My usual doctor is out of network (in fact, she's trying to quit taking insurance entirely), and I used HSA money to pay the bill for an annual checkup. Though I was technically paying "out of pocket," it was cash that would otherwise have gone toward higher premiums, so it was cheaper. In the end, I paid around $500 less for health care last year than I would have with the traditional plan. I also had no emergencies, though. That number would look different if I'd required anything beyond the usual routine stuff.

While the HSA saved me money, the politics of the thing (it's a tax shelter masquerading as a health-care policy) drive me nuts, so I'm quite happy to be saying goodbye to it and heading back to a traditional plan.

Which prompted the question: Uh oh, what do I do with the HSA balance? The entire idea of HSAs is that unlike FSAs, the balance doesn't "expire" at the end of the year -- you're supposed to accumulate funds, as you would in a 401k or other savings plan. An HSA also is intended to be portable. If you change jobs, you can keep it.

But since I'm not going to be funding the HSA any longer, I don't really want to drag around the $230 or so I have left in it and keep it long-term. I was procrastinating in figuring out how to kill the balance when Amex solved the problem for me: it's also ditching its HSA plan.

Seems the HealthPayPlus HSA business isn't working out for American Express, the provider of my plan, and it's sold its accounts on to ACS/Mellon. Amex sent me a packet of papers to fill out to transfer my account to Mellon, but at the bottom was some fine print noting that if I don't take action by Jan. 18, Amex will simply close my HSA and send a check for the balance.

Score one for procrastination! I love it when ignoring problems actually does make them go away.

This distribution has tax implications. Because HSA funds come out of paychecks pre-tax, I'll presumably have to pay taxes on the money I get in the check from Amex. The paperwork they sent goes into no detail on how that will work -- it simply says "contact your tax advisor for more information regarding the tax implications of this option."

I am my tax advisor, and I have no clue, so I'm going to rely on the tactic that has been working so well for me: ignoring it. Whatever happens, the dollar amount is so small I'm not particularly worried about getting hit with a tax bill.

New job ahoy

My sister is IMing "post to the blog about your job!," and since I've now pretty much spread the word internally and externally to all relevant corners, I can: another of the Big Changes I'm navigating right now is a move from my current magazine to a new one, where I'll be editing the Web site.

I'm excited about the switch for a bunch of reasons, but one especially cool aspect of the new gig is that it's with Time Inc. Readers with long memories may remember me writing about my annual wrangle with the company over my subscription cost for Time magazine. Let's see if being on staff makes it any easier for me to keep my subscription current! Pricing standoffs aside, Time Inc. has always been of my journalistic pantheons, along with the Washington Post Co., so it's pretty nifty to be headed there as a staffer.

Birds & Bills started two years ago as I was in the midst of a job change and working my way through all the bureaucracy of arranging health coverage, retirement plans, and other benefits elections. I'm once again working my way through the fine print and weighing choices, so expect a flurry of posts ...

(The post about divorce and finances is sparking lots of discussion; I'll try to expand on it later this week. In the meantime, happy Turkey day, everyone!)

Women, money and divorce

It's been an eventful fall here, with all sorts of big changes on the horizon (more details later this week -- I'm about to have a lot of finance blog fodder). One of them has been a really sad, frustrating change: One of my best friends is getting divorced.

It's painful on all fronts. I'm kind of stuck standing by helplessly, knowing there's not a lot I or anyone else can do to cushion the grief and misery that comes with losing the partner you've been with for more than a decade and had expected to be with for the rest of your life.

It's also been painful financially. I've had other friends go through major breakups and even divorces, but we're all young enough that these usually fell into the "starter marriage" camp: two people splitting who had little in the way of Major Complications, in the form of kids or significant assets. It's still an emotional wrench, but it at least clears one major hurdle to separation when you each have a job and don't have any big investments to wrangle about dividing.

This wasn't that. It's what previously, naively, seemed to me an almost antiquated kind of divorce: the kind where one partner's earning power so outstrips the other's that the financial imbalance creates its own big nasty complication. There are many other issues at play here, but what it boils down to is: because my friend jointly signed financial papers when they were married -- loans, the mortgage on their house, etc -- she's going to be on the hook for payments to maintain the lifestyle of a partner she is no longer with.

That is ... wow. Ouch.

I suppose this is no different than what men historically went through with alimony, watching part of their paychecks disappear to an ex-spouse they were no longer with and may not have remained on anything resembling amicable terms with. But it's a shock to me to see the same dynamic play out now, in an era in which I've grown accustomed to greater independence in marriage.

It's also a nasty wake-up call. I know marriage is a serious legal commitment. I know joint-signing financial obligations is a serious legal commitment. But it's sobering to see how much those decisions can bite you when things turn in an unexpected way with the person you're committing to and with. And I hate that in so many of the breakups I've seen this year, the women consistently get screwed.

It seems like this is the odd dark side of our relatively comparable earning power. I remember a smattering of divorces among my parents' friends -- a few, in particular, that were the classic cliché of Man Throwing Over Steadfast Wife for Shiny New One. In those cases, alimony and other financial obligations made sense: if one partner had no opportunity to have a career and was left stranded without one, then yes, the departing partner should still have obligations. And obviously, it's a whole different game when kids are involved, since there's no question that parents have responsibilities, financial and beyond, that persist even if their marriage does not.

But in the breakups among my friends, what I'm seeing is a trend of women left on the hook for obligations incurred by boyfriends or husbands who are simply failing to be fully functional, financially responsible adults. (I'm not saying that judgmentally. God knows I have been through periods of being Fiscally Unsound, and I'm fully aware that a lot of luck is involved with me being as relatively financially secure as I now am.) For example, many of my friends have co-signed loans for partners with weak credit -- and then, when the relationship dissolves, they're stuck with that obligation.

I don't know exactly where I'm going with this train of thought, or what the answer is. I suppose the flat reality is that divorce is messy and inevitably unfair, in any era or set of circumstances. But it has driven home the point that before you put yourself on the hook for any major financial obligation, to anyone, even your spouse, you need to think through all the worst-case-scenario ramifications and make a conscious decision about your willingness to risk them.

Getting scammed in Vegas

Or, "how I managed to (almost) lose money in the casino without so much as playing the slot machines."

I'm in Las Vegas this week covering a software conference. Vegas is, under the best of circumstances, not one of my favourite places, and for an assortment of reasons, this week is far from The Best of Circumstances. Feeling nauseous and mildly flu-like this morning, I decided to briefly escape the conference to hunt down some soup and hide with my book.

A minute or so after I sat down at The Noodle Shop (it sounded like a promising place for finding soup), another solo diner was seated at a table behind mine. Thirty seconds later, she was descending on mine.

"I don't want to eat alone!" she announced loudly. "Girls shouldn't eat alone! Can I sit with you?" she asked, as she sat down.

Well, ug. It had been a yucky morning. I was feeling sick. My brain was screaming "I'm an introvert in a cranky mood! No! Go away!"

But I am a polite introvert. So I sighed, forced a smile and said ok.

She proceeded to generally be loud, demanding and talkative. I said as little as I could get away with, trying to will the food to arrive fast so I could eat and escape, as she rattled on in a spacey way and I tried to melt into the carpet.

Here's where I should have twigged sooner something was up: She kept trying to involve me in her scene. Touching my arm. Trying to foist an appetizer on me, despite my strained insistence that no, really, I was feeling ill. Overall, creating the impression that we were actually dining together as a party.

And then, after the dishes arrived and she'd munched through most of hers, she stood up, announced she had an appointment, and walked out.

With me sitting there with a check.

Arugh. I was at that point so worn out and startled that it took me a full minute to realise what she'd engineered.

And then the feeling of stupidity set in. I live in New York. I have heard variants of almost every possible scam tried out on street corners and subways. I don't fall for them. But I'd managed to fall for this one.

Arugh.

My first inclination was to just pay the damn bill and be done with it. I'm traveling for work, most of my costs are being expensed, I could either find a way to write it off or just eat the $20.

But the principle of the thing annoyed me. I decided to see what would happen if I asked the waiter for a separate check. I think the restaurant staff saw what the woman had pulled, and the waiter brought me a check for just my side of the bill, quietly cleared away her side, and ignored it. I left a very nice tip.

So, in the end, the restaurant ate the loss, not me. But still. Just the kicker I needed for my Annoying Frustrating No Good Very Bad Day. And now I have learned the unpleasant way: If someone plants themselves at your table in a restaurant (especially in a place like Vegas), ask for separate checks straight off -- or fight down the polite impulses and tell them you intend to eat alone.

A really new spin on branch banking

By way of reader Laurie Amster-Burton comes this wacky news about ING Cafes: retail locations for my new sort-of bank, where they invite you to enjoy a cheap coffee, free Internet, and explore their financial products.

I had never heard of this before (thanks Laurie!), but there is apparently an ING Cafe in NYC. Clearly, a Birds & Bills field trip is required!

I'm actually on my way out of my brief financial relationship with ING. My first direct-deposit paycheck arrived safely at WaMu last Friday, so it looks like all systems are go to declare that my fully operational new bank. Getting the last of my money out of NetBank proved surprisingly painless, despite the whole scary FDIC-shutdown craziness: Since my funds were well below the $100,000 insurance cap, I was able to simply write myself a check for my account balance and cash it with WaMu. I left a ceremonial $1 in the account. I'm kind of curious to see how long ING will consider me a customer, with my $1 investment.

Wow

My bank went bankrupt.

I can't exactly claim I didn't see the writing on the wall, but still. It's a bit of a shock to go to your bank's website to check your account and instead find a shut-down notice from the FDIC.

This appears to be one of the largest bank failures (but not the very largest) in modern times. I'm digging around for references. This encyclopedia.com article has data charts suggesting that since 1980, only three banks with assets of over $1 billion have failed, none since 1992. Netbank had $2.3 billion on deposit.

What happened? The best I can suss out without prolonged digging is that Netbank made big bets on the mortgage business and suffered for it when the housing market began collapsing. Netbank's regulator, the Office of Thrift Supervision, put out a press release Friday attributing Netbank's heavy losses to "early payment defaults on loans sold, weak underwriting, poor documentation, a lack of proper controls, and failed business strategies." Ouch.

I mused a few weeks ago that Netbank's announced purchase by EverBank didn't seem to be happening very quickly. I was a few days early -- three days after I posted that, Everbank cancelled the deal, saying Netbank was too distressed to meet closing conditions. Had I been paying attention to Netbank news, I might have noticed the Atlanta Journal-Constitution piece saying the next likely step would be an FDIC intervention.

Personally, I won't lose anything in this mess. The FDIC insures accounts up to $100,000, and I had far, far (far) less in my Netbank account even at peak usage. As mentioned here previously, I was in the process of moving to WaMu, since I didn't want to migrate to EverBank. Talk about lucky timing: I cancelled my direct deposit two weeks ago. It isn't yet active at WaMu, but the paycheck I got today (a live check) was the first in years not to go straight into my Netbank account.

I'm left with about $240 tied up in my Netbank account. ING is acquiring Netbank's insured deposits (for, literally, a penny on the dollar). I'm waiting to find out how that will work, but it may actually be remarkably painless. I'd initially assumed I'd have to wait for my account to transfer to ING's system and the reissuance of an ATM card, checking account number, etc etc, but the FDIC FAQ claims my debit card and checks will continue working without interruption. If that's so, then it seems ING is physically gaining access to Netbank's systems. In that case, I think I can write a check to myself for everything left in my Netbank account (once the website resurrects and I can find out how much that is), deposit it at WaMu, and be done with it.

Not everyone will be so lucky. Of Netbank's 104,000 customers, 1,500 had accounts exceeding insurance limits, totaling $109 million. The limits -- $100,000 per person -- sound hefty, but not when you look at them in terms of a life savings. The Pittsburg Post-Gazette had a scary, sad story about a retired local citizen who saw his $521,000 nest egg vanish in this year's other bank bankruptcy, the fall of Pittsburgh's Metropolitan Savings Bank.

RIP Netbank. I was a customer for eight years; this isn't how I thought our business relationship would end.

Kicking Mint.com's tires

For any who haven't heard of it yet, Mint.com is a site that aggregates all your financial accounts in one centralize portal.

I first came across Mint.com a few months ago, and had a lingering beta code I hadn't yet gotten around to using. I see they went public with a splash last week, winning the TechCrunch conference demothingie, and the resulting flood of blog attention reminded me that I should go give Mint a try. So I signed up last week (after the website crawled back from the lag-and-crash slashdot effect winning the conference had), imported a batch o' financial data, and started poking around.

Here's the disclosure part of my Mint tire-kicking: Mint initially popped up on my radar as a direct competitor to a fledgling personal-finance start-up I've been doing some consulting work for. I got involved because I liked the idea of a website that will let you centrally manage a zillion financial accounts and optimize your money management. Some months down the road, I found out about Mint and how it's also working toward that goal. Yeep.

So, I have a direct interest in not having Mint be the ultimate perfect site for managing finances. On the other hand, I also have a direct interest in finding a site that will do that (it's a service I really want, dammit!), and as a personal-finance blogger and journalist, I want to check out anything that pops up in the field.

I think this is a fairly objective rundown of my impressions after a few days of working with Mint, but -- you've been forewarned. I may be biased. One important caveat: I haven't seen the demos and feature set yet for the Mint competitor I'm working with. My consulting is on editorial stuff only. So, where I criticize Mint features, I'm not trying to cast aspersions on a gap Rival Site fills; I honestly have no idea whatsoever whether they'll do better at the areas I see as flawed or not. My criticisms are based solely on what areas of functionality I find lacking for the ways I, personally, would like to use a site like this.

First, The Good Parts

It looks great. Full credit to their design team. Look-and-feel is no small thing; people have come up with all kinds of blather about what makes an application "Web 2.0," but to me, the biggest change I've seen in modern Web apps is a realization that design matters. Ugly, kludgy things are frustrating to use; we put up with it for years because we wanted the functionality software offered, but now that it's clear good aesthetic appeal is possible in software and Web apps, there's no excuse.

Also, good design costs money. I find that I trust sites more if they've obviously put in the resources to make themselves attractive -- and if I'm going to hand over the keys to my financial kingdom to a website, I'd better trust it. Mint's design (and, while we're at it, their URL -- I'm sure snagging that was pricey) suggests that they're a serious venture with resources.

Mint's account import features are pretty painless. Pop in logins and passwords, click buttons and poof! It took me about 10 minutes to populate Mint with two checking accounts and three credit cards. Within 10 minutes, I had a pretty robust data set for Mint to start mining.

The snazziest thing Mint does is automatically categorize your spending and offer dashboard-like graphs and analytics. For me, this is a fun toy. For someone actually trying to stick to a defined budget in various categories, it could be a very helpful tracking tool. (As I've mentioned previously, I don't budget.)

The big advantage of having all my accounts centralized in one interface, for me, is the ability to get a quick, high-level overview of what's happening. Mint seems more geared toward financial analytics than management. I don't see tools for, say, making a payment on a card directly from the Mint interface, or for aggregating due dates so I can see what I owe next. But if I want to just glance over all my accounts, and make sure there's no giant unexpected spikes (since we all know how attractive financial thieves find my accounts), this is a great timesaver.

Also, I like Mint's data-centralizing approach. Lots of people probably use Quicken to do similar things to what Mint does. But Quicken is a desktop app, which limits its accessibility to one PC, and it requires either data entry or synchronization. If that works for you, great. I'm lazy. It doesn't work for me. Mint automatically retrieves data from all the accounts you give it access to. I can neglect it, come back weeks later, and not have to fight through data catch-up.

The Less Good Parts

Mint is in beta, and I'm a big believer in incremental development, so I don't expect every possible feature to be in the application now. But I don't know what the future development plans and priorities are, and as Mint stands right now, it strikes me as a one-trick pony.

Mint gives you a neat set of analytics about your spending: how your current monthly spending tracks against your past spending patterns, how your cash-vs-debt ratio is doing, and so on. In addition to giving users fancy graphs and widgets, Mint uses this information to look for savings opportunities: It compares your info against some sort of data set of other available financial products, and makes suggestions.

This is both really clever and really problematic.

Mint is a free service. Mint says it plans to stay free and make its money on referral commissions from the offers shown on its "ways to save" page. This implies Mint will never show me an offer on that page from a financial services company that isn't an affiliate or advertiser of Mint. It also means those offers may or may not really fit my individual financial needs.

Mint currently has two offers showing right now for me, which it claims would save me $4,202 annually. So let's take a look at those offers.

The first offer suggests I switch my American Express card for a Discover card. Doing so gets me away from American Express's usurious 30.34% interest rate and into a 0% rate at Discover, potentially saving me $1,688 annually in forecast interest charges based on my usage pattern. Mint's calculator also adds in $515 in estimated cash-back payments from Discover.

Here's the flaws in that savings logic: The 0 percent APR is, of course, a six-month introductory one. After that, Discover's website puts the average APR at up to 18.99%. That's better than Amex's, but still a long way from 0%.

Also, if I wanted a Discover card, I would already have one. I did some pretty careful comparison shopping before picking my Amex IN NYC card as my primary plastic. Discover would be accepted at far fewer places than my Amex; I couldn't use it as a universal card as I can with the Amex for (almost) all purchases. And my Amex racks up annual rewards equivalent or better than the $500 or so in annual cash back Discover is dangling

So, Discover isn't a good fit. The second offer, swapping my Time Warner cable/Internet and Verizon phone combo for a Time Warner "All the Best" package is slightly more intriguing, but that involves swapping my landline for a digital one, and that's a complicated headache I'm going to postpone thinking about.

Overall, though, my criticism stands: I don't like the blurry line between "savings optimization service" and "advertorial engine."

If the savings offers are basically advertising window dressing underwriting Mint's core service, fine; I can live with that. But I don't know that the core service -- centralized accounts and pretty graphs -- are compelling enough to make me a regular Mint user. If identifying financial product savings opportunities are part of what Mint sees as its core service, I think the product analysis needs to be expanded beyond only those advertisers will pay to serve up.

My other big Mint criticism: As it stands now, it doesn't really track your financial life comprehensively. Part of what I would like in a financial portal is an ability to get a sense of how my longer-range financial pieces fit together. Mint is good for lining up "day to day" accounts: checking, savings and credit cards. But what do I do with my 401k? My student loans? My HSA (health savings account)? Mint's service doesn't really seem geared toward dealing with those kinds of long-term, low-daily-activity accounts.

The Uncertain

Ye gods and fishies, this is getting long. I'll just briefly touch on two other issues, and save any future observations on Mint for another post:

-Security: The immediate, kneejerk reaction many people seem to have to Mint is that aggregating all your financial logins in one place is the height of security stupidity. "One hack away from being an atom-bomb of identity theft" is how one Consumerist commenter put it.

I think that's a misguided, or at least superficial, concern. I haven't done a security dissection, but Mint doesn't seem to allow any easy reverse-engineering of stored passwords. The site doesn't display any of my logins, passwords and account numbers. To transactionally do anything with any of those accounts, I have to go offsite and log in at the provider's webpage. If someone got hold of my Mint login and password, they could see all of my transactions and get a snapshot of my financial life, but it doesn't look like they could immediately then rip off my accounts and wreak havoc with them. Sure, a sophisticated hacker could probably make all sorts of trouble if they got into Mint's infrastructure, but frankly, hackers routinely get into and make all sorts of trouble with the infrastructure of all kinds of financial services companies. I don't see Mint as any riskier than, say, having my 401k, credit card and bank accounts accessible at those institutions' Web sites.

-The future: Mint is currently running on venture-capital funding. The VC exit strategy in the Web 1.0 boom was "IPO." The VC exit strategy in the Web 2.0 boom is "get acquired."

I'm skeptical (perhaps wrongly; I dunno, I'm not a VC and haven't seen Mint's pitch presentation) that Mint's affiliate referral scheme will ever deliver booming revenue. Unless the company plans to later change its business model to introduce additional revenue streams, the likely real plan for monetizing the service is to sell it off.

It's not a bad plan. Google, Yahoo, and other Web Goliaths like to snap up sparkly startups, and Mint has a very slick interface and targets a very sought-after user demographic. I will be very unsurprised if it gets acquired within a year.

But someone, at some point, is going to have to monetize Mint, most likely through advertising. And advertising, as Mint's current offers section shows, has inherent conflicts-of-interest with optimizing your financial planning.

P.S.: I know Mint isn't the only thing out there doing what it does; other competitors include Wesabe and Cake Financial. I intend to check out Wesabe soon; Cake I'll probably avoid because it's geared toward investors, and my only investment is my 401k. Anything else I should be watching? Let me know in comments ...

The banking bake-off winner: WaMu

Sorry for the hibernation. I wrapped up my mad travel jag ... and promptly got consumed by freelance projects. Bad blogger! I promise to talk more here again.

I did finally solve my new-bank selection dilemma (detailed in part 1 and part 2 of my "eek Netbank got sold!" drama). The winner was WaMu (are they still technically Washington Mutual?), which met all my "I refuse to pay fees of pretty much any kind" criteria.

On paper, at least. WaMu's documentation is frustratingly contradictory on whether or not it charges fees for using non-WaMu ATMs; I suspect it's a holdover from their old account structure. I'm anecdotally assured that the WaMu Free Checking account is indeed fee-free.

Converting bank accounts is a sloooow process. Unsurprisingly. I signed up at WaMu's website around Aug 19. It took 15 minutes. But confirming my initial-deposit transfer from NetBank took about a week. Then it was another week for my ATM card to arrive. My PIN, sent under separate cover, was a few days more. Finally, this week, my starter checks arrived. All up, about three weeks to gather the bits and pieces needed to start my migration.

Today I went to a WaMu branch and changed my PIN from the randomly generated one to my preferred PIN, and made my first check deposit. I also used a voided starter check to fill out new direct-deposit forms. My company says it'll take 21 days to get that moved. So, it looks like another month before I can really move my financial life out of NetBank and over to WaMu.

Going with WaMu was as much an emotional decision as a straight financial one. Other banks like the Schwab Investor Checking account offer more financially advantageous things, like higher interest rates and reimbursement for outside ATM fees. But ... I've never had a local bank. Ever since college, I've used Net banks. (At the time, I couldn't find a single local bank without monthly service fees for low balances, which I am adamantly, categorically opposed to.) The idea of going to a local branch to deal with any customer-service issues, as I did this morning to change my PIN, is kind of novel. And while Internet banks have always worked out well for me financially, the one problem I keep running into is them getting sold out from beneath me. I'm not sure how much I trust banks with too-good-to-last terms like Schwab's.

So, I'm giving the WaMu thing a try. Will report back on how it works out!

Tangentially: I meant to move faster on this, since NetBank's initial Everbank announcement said it would do the conversion by "late summer," and for convenience's sake, it seems best for me to get out before that happens. But it's now September, beyond what anyone can reasonably call "late summer" ... and my NetBank account seems to be chugging on. So I checked today to see if they had an update, and found a terse little message linked in tiny print from the front page: " When we announced our agreement with EverBank in May, we expected to first complete the sale of other bank investments to have the means necessary to meet the terms of the EverBank agreement. The sale of these investments is taking longer than originally anticipated."

Uh oh. And I see NetBank is getting Nasdaq nastygrams, too. Whatever is happening under the hood over there does not seem good.

Using Gmail tags for tax document tracking

I have a long post on mortgages and general financial implosion in the works, but I wanted to throw up a quickie first about a handy Gmail trick I'm making heavy use of. Last year was the first in which I itemized my taxes, and the first time I needed to have a record of charitable dominations -- which, er, I didn't have, because I didn't realise I'd be itemizing and able to deduct. Forewarned is forearmed and all that, so this year, I'm keeping track of what I donate.

But keeping track of lots of bits of paper is a pain. Fortunately, I've found that I don't have to. I don't know if my pattern is the common one, but almost every donation I make is at least originated online, and often fulfilled that way. Which means that every donation generates an e-mail trail, with a thank-you and receipt. I created a charity tag in gmail to archive the e-mailed receipts, and voila. Instant filing system for donation records. Come tax time, I can just click my "charity" tag and tally up my donations.