A Guide to Online Investing Getting Started Choosing the right broker on the Internet isn't easy. Online brokers chart Researching companies online; websites that can help. Beware of online scams.

Features Diary of an online broker. The rush to invest online. Charles Schwab was one of the first online traders.

Sunday Columns Mutual Funds: Tracking information on mutual funds online. Investing: Glassman writes about trading stocks online.

By Albert B. Crenshaw
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, August 23, 1998; Page H1

Use of the Internet as a personal finance tool is exploding. Middle-class American families, who may once have thought of Wall Street as far away and mostly beyond their ken, are now doing investment research and even online trading as the Internet brings those services into living rooms.

With the Internet, "you have incredible information right at the tip of your finger," said Stephen L. Cohn of Sage Online Inc., a Bala Cynwyd, Pa., firm specializing in online mutual fund analysis. "In many cases it's free, or [if it's not] it's cost-effective. You can do research and use this tool any time you want. It's incredible."

But while the Internet is drawing attention as an investment research tool, bear in mind that it is also valuable for many other personal finance tasks – the kind that often seem fairly mundane but that, done right, can add greatly to a family's financial well-being.

These include saving, college and retirement planning, mortgage finance, and complex purchasing decisions. Online and financial services companies are spending millions of dollars on World Wide Web sites each year, and the information and calculations available on them become more sophisticated all the time.

The firms obviously hope that visitors to their sites will buy goods and services through it or from advertisers on it, but there is a growing realization that to lure customers, a site has to provide truly useful stuff, and operators are trying to do that.

In fact, there is so much now available that a number of Internet companies are creating Web sites designed to help you sort through the forest and pick out the most useful trees. Among these are Quicken.com (www.quicken.com), Yahoo (www.yahoo.com for the main site, quote.yahoo.com for Yahoo Finance), and Microsoft (investor.msn.com for Microsoft Investor). In addition, services such as America Online are bolstering their personal finance offerings.

As a result, by going to companies' own sites or by using a Quicken or a Yahoo, you can get information and answers on a host of questions, not just about stocks and mutual funds. Here are some examples:

Mortgage finance. A house is likely to be a family's biggest purchase, and choosing a mortgage in the first place, or refinancing it later on, are big-ticket decisions.

Families wondering whether they can afford a house and other mortgage-related questions can turn to any number of Web sites for help. Fannie Mae, the giant buyer of home mortgages, for example, operates a site (www.homepath.com) that gives detailed information for home buyers – first-time, repeat and refinancers. Visitors to the site can calculate how much how they can afford, figure mortgage payments and do what-if scenarios.

Visitors can also e-mail the company if they have questions. Likewise, Yahoo Personal Finance (quote.yahoo.com) offers a Loan Center, where a visitor can find all sorts of tools, including calculators that do annual principal and interest (you plug in the loan amount, interest rate and term), full amortization tables with a monthly breakdown of principal and interest, loan-qualification calculators, and other resources.

Automobiles. Looking for a new car? A used car? Want an idea of prices? How about loan terms? There are specific sites that specialize in car questions, such as Edmund's Auto Guide (www.edmund.com), and there are auto loan sections at Quicken, Yahoo and other such sites.

Microsoft's CarPoint (carpoint.msn.com) also offers new-car prices, used-car classifieds, interest-rate quotations and payment calculators.

Insurance. Auto, homeowners and term life insurance rates are easily obtainable online. Quicken.com, for example, offers quotations on those as well as disability coverage on its site. Type in your Zip code and get a quote.

But insurance also highlights the limitations of the online systems. Though it's easy to get information about term insurance (life coverage that lasts for a period of years and pays a death benefit only), more complex questions involving cash-value policies, which have an investment component and which may be preferable for certain estate-planning strategies, quickly get beyond the scope of most online services.

Taxes. While sites such as Quicken are plainly hoping you'll buy their tax-preparation software, there are a number of questions that online services can address very well. For example, should you convert an existing individual retirement account to a Roth IRA? Most of the general sites tackle this question, as do brokerage and mutual fund sites.

T. Rowe Price (www.troweprice.com), for example, offers an interactive Roth IRA conversion analysis, along with retirement and college planning tools, fund prices, and other data.

And there are a host of specialty sites, ranging from travel planning (for example, www.mapquest.com) to cellular telephone analysis. If you're shopping for a cell phone, Wireless Dimension (www.wirelessdimension.com) offers a program to help people in the top 25 U.S. markets figure out which is the best deal. It walks you through a series of questions about usage, asks what kind of phone you prefer and comes up with the plans that most closely match your requirements.

And don't forget the government. Want to get the postage right on a letter to France? The Postal Service (www.usps.gov) has domestic and international postage rates. Need tax forms and publications? The IRS Digital Daily (www.irs.ustreas.gov) may be the answer. Want to buy U.S. Treasury securities? Beginning Sept. 16, in time for the Sept. 21 auction, you will be able to do that at the Bureau of Public Debt's Web site (www.publicdebt.treas.gov).

The Internet isn't the answer to everything, of course. For complex personal decisions, there is no substitute for in-person expert advice. And don't assume that everything you read on your screen is correct. Online chat rooms are notorious for stock manipulations and other scams, and many Web sites are little more than advertising.

But for many people, especially younger ones who may be more at home with computer lingo than with financial terminology, the Internet is a great place both to start your education and to wrestle with a lot of those daily financial problems