Finding Great Financial Sites

The Duo take on a topic near everyone's heart: managing money.

If you think about where money lives nowadays, say the Duo, it's predominantly not in your wallet--it's in cyberspace. Saving, borrowing, and spending have all become primarily paperless activities. Your life savings and your debts are essentially just ones and zeroes stored in a computer.

Financial institutions have been moving money around using computers for years. But now, thanks to the Web, the rest of us can do it, too. And, thanks to the Web, you can now comparison shop for financial products the same way you do for, say, running shoes. Everything is out there, from mortgages to annuities to insurance policies.

A good place for both borrowers and lenders to start is Bankrate.com . If you're a lender, you'll find national and regional rates for everything from money market accounts to long-term jumbo CDs. Borrowers can get current info on just about any kind of loan you can think of: mortgage, home equity, car, college, even credit cards. It's a great place to begin searching for bank and loan services.

Steve notes that he finds himself annoyed with a lot of the insurance sites, which let you put in a ton of information and then at the very last minute demand a phone number and/or an e-mail address so an agent can contact you. Many car shopping sites do this as well--and Steve won't use those, either. But one site he's found that does let you window-shop and get actual prices is Insure.com . Unfortunately, that's mostly for life insurance. For other kinds of policies, site operators typically want a lot of personal information. Car and health insurance companies in particular seem to want to run your info against some databases before giving you a quote. That's annoying if all you want is a quick comparison--which you can get at Bankrate.com, but probably not in as much detail as you'd like unless you happen to match one of the very few specific profiles it offers.

Steve also likes ImmediateAnnuities.com , which gives you a look at--immediate annuities. They're not the most popular financial instruments in the world, but you can use them as a sort of quick-and-dirty way to consider how much your retirement nest egg is worth as an income stream. Plug in some basic information and the site spits back some numbers. There's no obligation, and no need to give up even an e-mail address.

Angela notes that financial portal sites are a great place to look for financial info. The two most popular are Yahoo Finance and MSN Money , both of which are remarkably information-rich environments. Angela finds the MSN offering to be somewhat better organized, but if you dig around, you'll find some extra goodies on Yahoo--for example, bond pricing. Steve hops back in with a name check for Forbes.com , the free site offered by the folks at his day job, and, of course, WSJ.com --The Wall Street Journal's Web site, which will cost you $50 or $100 a year depending on whether you're a subscriber to the print edition or not. Both sites have tons of info on how to handle your money.

And, says Angela, don't forget the sites paid for by your tax dollars. The Social Security Administration site can provide precise information about what to expect from your retirement--though, of course, it can't say precisely what might happen if the laws change. Companies' SEC filings are all online now as well; there's really an embarrassment of riches in the investment field. (And for those of you who enjoy the sordid details of such things, Angela suggests paying regular visits to Footnoted.org , where Michelle Leder digs up the dirt on what's really lurking in the paperwork. And you wouldn't have heard about it from the Duo if you weren't reading this summary instead of watching the video; aren't you glad you clicked here?)

As with any financial info, proceed with caution; a ridiculous number of sites stack their advice in favor of whatever financial product or service they're shilling. (For instance, the brokerage Steve uses always seems to give its products great ratings, even when more-independent sites don't.) And even sites that you might initially consider independent often have deals with "partners" that can skew the advice they give.