How will Hello Wallet benefit me? Is it worth the cost?
CreditKarma review I don't personally use HelloWallet, but I have also heard very good things about it. Independence from financial products is a HUGE thing in the field because so many investment advisers place the firm before the customer (c.f. Too Big To Fail), so having an independent resource is a huge benefit.
How do I determine what to pay the person? You pay them either what you believe the work is worth to have done for you, vs doing it yourself, or how much they ask for after negotiation. There's no rule of thumb because it's driven by the market.  There will always be people who are willing and able to do the work for less than you, but can't always get work (which is the reason they are charging less) just as there will always be people who charge much more than you and have to turn work away. You are at a comfortable medium where you have enough work to charge a moderate rate, and can amplify your reputation/network/client by subcontracting the work out. As an example: If I charge $120/hr to do engineering work, but I want to subcontract it out, then I have to take into account that: So, let's say I have a contract for 20 hours of work at $120/hr ($2,400), and I figure that I can subcontract out all of it.  However it's going to cost me about 4 hours of work to: review their 20 hours of work, deal with administrative overhead, interpret and pass along requirements, etc. So if I work 4 hours, then the maximum I can pay the contractor for 20 hours of work is the remaining 16 hours x $120 (the contractor would be doing 20 hours for $96/hr) to break even on cash, and I only make 4x$120 worth of profit for 4 hours worth of work.  That's actually a net loss, unless you can already fill those other 16 hours with paying work. I don't think that would be worth it. But if the contractor only required $60/hr, then you're paying him $1,200 for 20 hours of work, and you get to keep $1,200 for only 4 hours of your time.  The subcontractor has turned your $120/hr rate into $300/hr. Now, you still only net $1,200 rather than the full $2,400, so your revenue is down, but if you can find work for that other 16 hours at your normal rate, then you're still ahead.  Alternately you might find that working only 12 hours a week is a fine way to live, and choose to forgo that revenue for personal time. The costs and break-even point vary greatly from situation to situation, but hopefully this gives you a framework to evaluate the decision for yourself. Absolutely.... False. The united states throws away more food than any other country in the world and yet other countries have healthier food. Just try to put yourself in the shoes of the wealthiest. Imagine the power and temptation behind paying off the regulators and having your own wallet fueled by billions of people. Its absurd to think it's not happening. I love how even Stephen Hawking says the end of humanity is not some cosmic explosion or the sun dying out. It's the immorality of capitalism.   Don't get me wrong, I believe capitalism has amazing benefits like resiliency to economic collapse and how competition drives progress, but we absolutely need a baseline to protect natural human rights like health, food, poverty and birth control.   Do you really think that immigration in politics has to do with race or stifling stem cell research is due to religion? Its All. About. The. Money. Assets can be acquired in different ways and for different purposes. I will only address common legal ways of acquiring assets. You can trade one asset for another asset. This usually takes place in the form of trading cash or a cash equivalent for an asset. The asset received should be of equal or greater value than the asset given in the eyes of the purchaser in order for the trade to be rational. Take this example: I am selling a bike that has been sitting on my porch for a few months. It's worth about $25 to me. My friend, Andy, comes by and offers $90 for it. I happily accept. Andy valued the bike at $110. This transaction produced value for both parties. I had a value benefit of $65 (90 - 25) and Andy had a value benefit of $20 (110 - 90). You can receive an asset as a gift or an inheritance. Less common, but still frequent. Someone gives you a gift or a family member dies and you receive an asset you did not own previously. You can receive an asset in exchange for a liability. When you take out a loan, you receive an asset (cash) which is financed by a liability (loan payable). In your case: Why would I buy a mall if having assets worth the same amount as the mall? I must value the mall more than the assets I currently have. This may stem from the possibility of greater future returns than I am currently making on my asset, or, if I financed the purchase with a liability, greater future returns than the cost associated with payment on the principal and interest of the liability. It's a good question, I am amazed how few people ask this. To summarise: is it really worth paying substantial fees to arrange a generic investment though your high street bank? Almost certainly not. However, one caveat: You didn't mention what kind of fund(s) you want to invest in, or for how long. You also mention an “advice fee”. Are you actually getting financial advice – i.e. a personal recommendation relating to one or more specific investments, based on the investments' suitability for your circumstances – and are you content with the quality of that advice? If you are, it may be worth it. If they've advised you to choose this fund that has the potential to achieve your desired returns while matching the amount of risk you are willing to take, then the advice could be worth paying for. It entirely depends how much guidance you need. Or are you choosing your own fund anyway? It sounds to me like you have done some research on your own, you believe the building society adviser is “trying to sell” a fund and you aren't entirely convinced by their recommendation. If you are happy making your own investment decisions and are merely looking for a place to execute that trade, the deal you have described via your bank would almost certainly be poor value – and you're looking in the right places for an alternative. ~ ~ ~ On to the active-vs-passive fund debate: That AMC of 1.43% you mention would not be unreasonable for an actively managed fund that you strongly feel will outperform the market. However, you also mention ETFs (a passive type of fund) and believe that after charges they might offer at least as good net performance as many actively managed funds. Good point – although please note that many comparisons of this nature compare passives to all actively managed funds (the good and bad, including e.g. poorly managed life company funds). A better comparison would be to compare the fund managers you're considering vs. the benchmark – although obviously this is past performance and won't necessarily be repeated. At the crux of the matter is cost, of course. So if you're looking for low-cost funds, the cost of the platform is also significant. Therefore if you are comfortable going with a passive investment strategy, let's look at how much that might cost you on the platform you mentioned, Hargreaves Lansdown. Two of the most popular FTSE All-Share tracker funds among Hargreaves Lansdown clients are: (You'll notice they have slightly different performance btw. That's a funny thing with trackers. They all aim to track but have a slightly different way of trading to achieve it.) To hold either of these funds in a Hargreaves Lansdown account you'll also pay the 0.45% platform charge (this percentage tapers off for portolio values higher than £250,000 if you get that far). So in total to track the FTSE All Share with these funds through an HL account you would be paying: This gives you an indication of how much less you could pay to run a DIY portfolio based on passive funds. NB. Both the above are a 100% equities allocation with a large UK companies weighting, so won't suit a lower risk approach. You'll also end up invested indiscriminately in eg. mining, tobacco, oil companies, whoever's in the index – perhaps you'd prefer to be more selective. If you feel you need financial advice (with Nationwide) or portfolio management (with Nutmeg) you have to judge whether these services are worth the added charges. It sounds like you're not convinced! In which case, all the best with a low-cost passive funds strategy. "I think that you're missing one significant point: NFC is not only used for payments. It's a general protocol (""Near-Field Communication"") that is supposed to provide easy connectivity between adjacent devices. As such, built-in encryption/security are counter-productive the same way as built-in encryption/security are counter-productive in IP: you're forcing something from a higher layer on a lower layer. Applications that use NFC but don't need this extra security will pay unnecessary penalty. Here come providers like Apple Pay, Android Pay, Samsung Pay and others. They provide applications that use NFC for specific purpose. And they provide the security needed for that purpose. Banks are welcome to introduce their own applications, but they lack the client base to make it wide enough spread for POS providers to include it. Visa/Mastercard have their own ""near-field"" solutions already that are embedded in cards themselves, and are not necessarily interested in competing with software giants like Apple or Google in their fields. Phone manufacturers also lack the wide enough client base (with the exception of Samsung, which is very popular and as the result is able to pull off its own payment system - I think they're partnered with Visa)." "Yodlee and Mint are good solutions if you don't mind your personal financial information being stored ""in the cloud"". I do, so I use Quicken. Quicken stores whatever you give to it for as long as you want: so the only question is how to get the credit card transactions you want into it? All my financial institutions allow me to view my credit card statements for a year back, and download them in a form Quicken can read. So you can have a record of your transactions from a year ago right now, and in a year you will have two year's worth." I dont use it yet, but i am building a custom app to run our event staffing business (none of the off the ahelf stuff makes us happy), and we want the option to be able to blast a text to our people when needed, and also to allow them to opt into sms notifications. So i will be building that in.   since you asked for feedback, at 3 cents a text you will get no business. That is 4-5 times the going rate of providers like twillio and aws. The only way you add value is if you offer a small free tier (say 200 sms/month for free) or if you make it super easy for the customer. What i mean by that is, to use twillio or aws requures some development chops - ie, you have to connect to their api. Well, tons of business owners do t even know what that is, so if your service allows some non technical retail owner to collect a list of numbers, dump it into a simple box online (and save for later use) and then format a msg and click send, all from a clean browser experience, that would add value. But i also say that having done zero market research, who knows, such a service may exist already.  Anyways, curious what you thought someone would pay 3 cents a msg for?  Also, if you haven't yet, you should be looking at all of Amazons cloud offerings. If you are building anything technical, look at their Lambda product. It allows super cheap, serverless functions; basically you write the app, call it, and only pay for the time it runs. On demand, highly scalable, and you dont have to maintain a pricey server that might sit idle for houra at a time. "It comes down to the resolution you want to have on your personal finances.  A package like GNUCash allows you to easily answer questions like ""Exactly how much do I spend on interest per month/year/decade.""  Same with pretty much any other expense, liability or asset you have whether it be taxes, utilities, your home equity or your net worth.  The other tools you mention are nice, and certainly convenient, but they tend to lump things together in broad strokes and omit many categories altogether (taxes).  Ultimately by having such a fine grained accounting tool, you can target small or large things to better budget your money.   Another thing a package like GNUCash provides is a single, private place to consolidate all of your finances.  This is nice for things like net worth and asset accounts that you might not want to give a company access to. Finally, GNUcash in particular helps normal people think like accountants.  Rather than lump everything into 'income' and 'expenses', once you start using GNUCash you'll start thinking in terms of equity, liabilities, net-worth and assets in addition to income and expenses.  This gives me a much more accurate view of my finances and helps me better target areas for improvement.  In short, it helps me to see the broader picture which helps me to keep my eye on the prize - which of course is to not have to worry about money at all."