Does your soccer team need new uniforms? Does your church group need to raise money to pay for a trip? Do you want to raise money by running a marathon? Most people have been involved in sponsorship efforts in some way, and now there is a website to use for this purpose. After looking the website over and poking around a bit (I did not have a real thing to sponsor so I felt actually signing up for the service was a bit unethical), I decided that this would be a great site for anyone looking to raise a little bit of money over a short time. This site would not be good for massive capital campaigns however, but I don’t think that is the intention of EasySponsorship.com.

From what I gathered the site works as follows. First you sign up, then you spend some time designing a page (which Easysponsorhip.com generously provides tools for), once your page is created you set sponsorship goals. Once you have your goals established you are pretty much done. Then you promote the site by emailing everyone you know and hoping they are willing to sponsor your project. It is here that I think they could improve a bit. One of the main reasons a site like this would be appealing to someone is making it easier to get sponsors. Yet in the end you are left to promote the page and gather your own sponsors. This leads me to wonder why bother when really alls I have accomplished is putting my sponsorship online. Another problem I have is that you can’t request money from EasySponsorship.com until you have made at least twenty percent of your goal. Why? Isn’t it my money and if I only made five or ten percent through the site why can’t I have it?

Yet despite the faults, I do see some value to the site and if ever I have a need for sponsorship drives, I will certainly give them another look. If you or someone you know has had experience with this site please let me know, I would love to know how it turned out.

While it may seem that there are a massive ammount of products out there that claim to save you money, make it easier to prepare for the future, or even make you money, xpenser dosn’t claim to do any of this. The only thing it claims to be able to do is making tracking your daily expenses easier and convienent. I actually have to agree with them on this, they do make it easier to track your expenses.

xpesner is currently in free beta testing and once you create an account you can set up your email, your voice mail, instant messenger, and SMS/Text services to be able to send xpenser notices of your expenditures. For example, say you go to the gas station and fill up your tank with forty dollars of gas. If your cell phone is internet ready you can log into your email, create a new email to e@xpenser.com then type into the subject line gas, 40.00 and send it. Now when you next log into xpesner you will see the expense as well as any other expenses you have sent in.

While I guess the idea of tracking your expenses isn’t new, I don’t think I have ever seen and easier and more immediate way to do it. So if you are like me and tend to loose receipts and forget that you actually spent money, something that allows you to pretty much immediately track expenses is certainly worth checking out.

The issue of identity theft is quickly coming to be a crisis in our society today. Because of the wide spread use of information technology it is becoming easier and easier for other people to gain access to your vital personal information such as social security numbers and addresses and then use this identity information to open several financial agreements that you may never know about until it is too late. The sad thing is that even if it wasn’t you who used your identity you are still likely to be the one holding the bill at the end of the day.

While several credit card companies are now offering some form of identity theft protection as part of their services, they often fall far short of truly protecting a persons identity. This is where Lifelock comes in. Started by Todd Davis, this company claims to be able to protect anyone against identity theft. Mr. Davis is so confident in his company that he has posted his own social security number on the life lock website. Not only this Lifelocks recent ad campaign shows Mr. Davis handing out sheets of paper with his social security number on them.

Still not convinced? Lifelock also offers a guarantee that if your identity is stolen while a member of Lifelock they will cover you up to 1 million dollars. Between these two things it can be easily assumed that at least Mr. Davis feels you are safe with Lifelock.

Even if you are not a millionaire this product is worth looking into. After all you never know when someone else may decide to be you for a while. You can sign up for Lifelock at www.lifelock.com.

Calling an Appraiser is nice, but in the future it is likely that most Internet surfers will first visit a new site, “Zillow,” to get an idea of property values. Zillow offers a free “do-it-yourself” comparable evaluation report for both buyers and sellers. How will that impact the business? Not much…yet.

Zillow has a database of about 60 million homes, based on property values, sales and other public records. They offer three evaluation tools for buyers, sellers and home owners who just want to track the value of their largest asset. “Zestimate” is a tool that provides a rough estimate of value based on a statistical proprietary algorithm. Zillow claims ninety percent accuracy. A Zestimate presents a range of values and a “Zindex” is the median value. Zillow instructions tell users to use a Zindex over a period of time to recieve a better evaluation.

Zillow also offers a free tool called “My Zestimator.” It follows logic familiar to any appraiser. First, users edit facts about their home. Then they pick the best choices from a list of relevant comparable sales in their locale. The Zestimator then computes a refined value. Zillow is smart though, and recognizes the difficulty in coming up with a home value based solely on figures and the assessment of an untrained user. They strive for ninety percent accuracy, but admit that this goal is not always possible. Of course, Zillow does not replace an appraisal, nor can its results be used to obtain a loan.

I am not even close to buying or selling a home, but I still found Zillow somewhat difficult to use at first. Zillow knows the complicated nature of this web app, so it gives its users some basic training to understand how to get best results. Basically, they receive a crash course in appraisal principles and how to use the Zillow tools. For those unfamiliar with appraisal techniques (Like myself), there is plenty of room for error. I pretty much have the hang of things now after playing with it for a while.

Zillow is very useful, and I am sure when I am ready to purchase or sell a home, many of Zillow’s features will be of great help. This site offers a great amount of information, but this information my be incorrect. Realtors should be prepared for many questions, as some people might have visited Zillow first. Zillow claims to be 90% accurate, so not everyone will be right and Realtors may have problems on their hand in explaining themselves over Zillow. Best suggestion is to visit Zillow yourself if you are a Realtor.

Check it out at www.zillow.com

Quicken has been producing financial products for well over a decade now and is one of the leaders in this crowded market place. Given their well known name and some previous experience with other products of theirs I decided to see if they were what I remembered them to be. Armed with a downloaded trial version I booted up the program and prepared to run Quicken 2008 through all the ins and outs.

After a brief introduction to the new features of Quicken such as ‘My savings plan’, a new navigation account bar, and the wonderfully named ‘Billminder gadget’ I came to the main account screen of the Quicken 2008 program. At first I found myself slightly confused as there was no automatic tutorial to guide me through my first Quicken session. However I found out quickly that Quickens intuitive interface did not require much of a tutorial to figure out.

After playing around with the main screen for a while, I decided to start inputting account information. I was expecting to spend a good deal of time with this as in the past with other products I would have to search my personal records for information on balances, expected expenditures and the like. However with Quicken 2008 this was not the case. I simply entered my financial institutions name and after asking for my username and password Quicken downloaded information from my banks website right down into the program.

The next face of setting up Quicken to track my finances was the entering of expenses. While Quicken 2008 does not offer the ease of set up with bill paying as it did with account information, I found this process to be much less painful than usual simply because I had not been exhausted by tracking down and entering all of my account information. Once all my expected bills had been entered I was rewarded with a sharp looking display of all my finances in one place.

All in all Quicken 2008 is a good product. It is simple to use, takes advantage of the increasing web presence of banks and other financial institutions and allows for a degree of user customization. While other products may have more bells and whistles, I found the ease and simplicity of the program refreshing and even enjoyable. While I can’t swear this is the product for everyone I certainly can see it is a good product for me and plan to purchase the entire program in the future.

Check out these related products from amazon.com:

• Quicken 2007 For Dummies
  
• Quicken 2008 Deluxe
• Quicken 2008 Starter Edition [First-Time Users Only] ($9.99)