| REVIEWS
Cruising
Cyberspace
Web
Site Pick Of The Month
By Pam Wegmann
Chances are, you
spend a significant amount of time thinking about your financial goals
and objectives. Managing finances has become a major concern for all of
us, whether it be our personal finances for the individual or family, company
finances, or both for the business owner. Here is a Web site that will
give you lots of information to help you in your decision making:
http://www.bankrate.com
This is the electronic
home of the publication, Bank Rate Monitor, known for providing independent,
objective financial information aimed primarily at the consumer side of
financial services. The site gets high marks based on our criteria: solid,
usable content and ease of navigation. The site design is logical, with
information cubbyholed in logically divided topics. Visually, the site
appears clean with an adequate amount of white space and judicious use
of graphics.
The Web has opened
up a vast array of new choices for the financial services consumer. Whereas
at one time, a consumer was more or less relegated to their local market
for items such as CDs, it is now possible to shop nationwide for the best
competitive rates and terms. This site makes that comparison shopping easy.
Louisiana financial institutions will now have to compete with institutions
from as far away as California or North Dakota. Conversely, however, these
same local institutions can now also compete for new markets and customers
all over the United States.
Bankrate.com's home
page always provides a brief chart with the day's average rates for various
types of financial products: mortgages, new car loans, home equity
loans, and CDs. The day's rates are also compared to those of the previous
week and six months prior. One can get a greater amount of rate detail
by clicking on one of the links on the left column.
There are almost
too many links on the left menu - nineteen in all - with the first
grouping dedicated to various kinds of financial product categories:
mortgages, credit cards, auto loans, money market mutual funds, savings,
and online banking. Clicking through to a number of them, we discovered
somewhat of a standardized format for each of these pages: the day's
average rates, options for customizing rates by state, current articles
on the product topic, and archived articles.
For example, at Mortgages,
the first button, you get the day's average rate on various kinds of mortgages.
You can also hone down to a particular state level, getting the average,
highest, and lowest rates for a particular Market, plus the Points and
the APR. It has a calculator to compute monthly payments at various
percentage rates.
There's a link to
tutorials on the basics of buying a house and one to articles relating
to mortgages, including horror stories. (Nothing like building that first
time buyer confidence!) The articles are written by Bankrate.com staff.
There are links to
other pages that are similarly structured for Credit Cards, Auto Loans,
Money Market Mutual Funds, and Savings.
There's also an Online
Banking link that is an excellent primer for getting started banking online.
Then to help you implement your decision, Bankrate.com offers - are you
ready? - Web site reviews! They review bank's web sites (but only
banks). From the big national guys to some small credit unions, they
rate them 1 - 4 mouse symbols. So you can shop on the spot for a bank,
then link to the actual site, and start banking online.
The site is a goldmine
of information and news you can use immediately and definitely worth
bookmarking. Sooner or later you will need what this site has to offer.
March, 1999
Knowledge is Power!
Happy cruising! ;-)
Questions/Comments
can be sent to pam@info-matters.com
or faxed to 504.738.0016. You can also reach Ms. Wegmann at 504.738.0070.
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