ING Direct’s We the Savers website has been updated again. I discussed their declaration earlier, and if you haven’t read it, it’s definitely worth a look. Lots of great points on there.
The updated website has a number of new features. ING really wants us to save! There is a forum, some e-cards, freebies, and a daily poll.
The site is new, so as of yet, the forum’s not very hopping – but there are some interesting discussion topics, so it might be worth a look.
The freebies include website icons, a free bumper sticker offer(Is it a good idea to advertise on your car that you save money? Does that make you a target?), an option to sign up for e-mail tips, and a link to some calculators. I am a huge fan of calculators, because I like being able to see how saving just a few extra dollars every month will really start to add up. Boy, do I love compound interest. If you’re new to the saving realm, the e-mail tips might be for you, but if you’re a regular reader of Personal Finance blogs, I have a feeling it might all be old hat. That said, I signed up, just to check it out.
What stuck out the most to me are the e-cards. You can send them to savers or spenders. I’m not sure how I, a saver, would feel if someone sent me an e-card about that. “Hey, good job, you cheapskate!” Okay, so that’s not one of the card options. But you know what I mean. The spender cards – now those have real potential to be offensive. “Hello, friend. You should be a saver like me, but instead, you waste all your money on expensive things, and I am going to send you an e-card to commemorate that.” Interesting idea in theory, ING, but I’m not sure I agree with your execution.
What caught me the most was the e-mail that I got from ING announcing this site. They discussed the “Gift of Savings,” and I thought about the idea of doing just that. Why not start up a savings account at a high yield banking institution as a gift for someone. Of course, this might go the way of the spender e-card and end up offending someone, but it could be an especially good gift for a young person in your life or someone you know who is saving for a big ticket purchase, like a car or a vacation or a new home. Again, you’d need to know some personal info about them to get the account started, but if we’re talking family, you might have easy access to that information.
It’s just a thought anyway.
Megan is a 40-something government employee in the Washington, DC area. She got interested in Personal Finance when she got out of college and realized that her paycheck wasn’t going to go as far as she had hoped. Since starting this blog, she has managed to buy a house and make a solid start on her retirement goals, and hopes to help others do the same. Here is her story:
In 2007, I was a gainfully employed 20-something with no debt but not a lot of knowledge about personal finance. It was a co-worker’s comment about Roth IRAs that sent me to the internet, searching for information. It was then that I realized that I really didn’t know a whole lot about personal finance and that my current financial situation was due a lot to inherent frugal tendencies, generous family members, a fear of debt, and good luck. While that was working for me, clearly I needed a better plan.
While I had no debt, I was also pretty much living paycheck to paycheck and not worrying about going over budget (I say this as if I had a real budget) because I had an emergency fund set aside to cover any overages.
Except that’s not what an emergency fund is for.
So I did a lot of research, read a lot of blogs, and decided that I needed a plan. I needed to budget. I needed to know what I was spending my money on. I needed to prepare for the future.
I decided to create a blog not only to make myself accountable to others but also to share the knowledge that I gained along the way. I’ve learned so much from my fellow bloggers, and I hope that my readers can find something useful in what I have to share as well.
