This Banking Stuff Is Out Of Hand.

So I'm finished paying off my car this weekend. Which I thought was a good thing. Apparently my bank thinks that's a bad thing. I've had an account with them for 7 years and have never paid a fee for my checking account. Which is why I was surprised to find an 8 dollar monthly fee when I checked my account today. Apparently some time in the past two years they changed up all their rules and now have a bunch of different checking account levels. I don't care, I mostly just want somewhere for my paychecks to land before they get cut up and fed to various other entities. And the reason I could not care for so long was that if your accounts and loans totaled more than $10,000, they waived this $8 fee for swankified checking, or whatever its called. Now that I've paid back the loan, I no longer get a free ride. I'm pretty sure I don't use any of the features of this value added-status (aside from the .05% higher APY, woohoo!) so I called them up to see if I needed to downgrade or what, cause there's no damn way I'm paying you to hold my money.

Turns out there's another route into the gratis high-roller's checking club. You need to have direct depost, E-statements, and online bill pay enabled and they'll waive the monthly fee. Okay, I already do the first two cause I want less paper and I haven't done bill pay because it seems like adding a paper transaction for things I already do electronically. But they're sending the paper to someone else, so what do I care? (I actually hope that they can take care of most of these things electronically too) Whatever, at first glance this does seem marginally easier with all the payees on one page (after I set them all up) but I never really had any trouble remembering to pay three bills on three different websites. So I'm signed up for online bill pay which costs $5.75 a month but is free if you've got this super-platunim player's checking account that online bill pay makes free... seems nonsenically cyclical and backwards, are you sure I'm reading this right?

So essentially you'd charge me more money if I took advantage of fewer of your services, and less money if I make you do more work? Yeah, I know its really about locking me in to the institution to make changing banks more of a hassle. (which is why they weren't worried about me leaving when I had a loan) But honestly the only thing that made me think about leaving in 7 years was your 'incentive' to stay. Seems a little effed up if you ask me.

Keep Gas Expensive.

Have you seen a gas station lately? Its like they're giving that mess away. I'm half tempted to rub some in my armpits so I can savor the savings all day long. But that would be wasteful, and maybe a little bit dangerous. So I don't.

I do use Fuelly to track my miles per gallon over time and compare with my cohorts. But sometimes getting so wrapped up in MPG confuses just how much you're getting screwed over the price of gas. Did you get accustomed to paying $3.70 and thinking you were doing pretty damn well for yourself? Yeah me too.

I'd wistfully recall the good old days when I could top off and President Jackson would have my back. But at a little over $4 a gallon I've got Grant on a search party for Lincoln to cover the cost. Not really a prospect that makes you smile, but since you're accustomed, why not leverage it?

• Tip #6: Use gas prices to become your own hedge fund | I Will Teach You To Be Rich

This article describes "fuel hedging" as airlines typically do to protect themselves from rate increases. (you may be able to do the same with your heating oil company) Hedging on your gasoline costs involves the same type of though process, although you won't be saving because of the mass scale of your purchases. Its more like a method to highlight how much you're saving, rather than let that money slip away on beer and cotton candy.

Ramit suggests tracking cost per week, but I'm using the average cost of a tank per month instead. (mostly because my expenditures aren't exactly linear; granted there are variations like the actual amount in a 'tank' but I'm willing to sacrifice for simplicity's sake) I've looked at my recent purchases and decided that I'm fairly comfortable with paying $40 for a tank of gas. Oddly enough that's well under what's been going on for the past few months.

If we take a peek at last year in comparison, a $40 hedge might seem excessive. Especially since I started the year paying about $25 a tank. (I did start buying 93 octane in April, but that's not the sole factor here)

So you can see the basic trend, when gas prices are low, I'd be pocketing the difference into a special account. And when its expensive I'd have money already set aside. Well, I haven't been running this hedge fund since 2007, but if I'd been prescient enough to realize that gas would top $4.60 here's what it would look like.

And here's this year taking into account the outstanding surplus I'd attained in 2007.

That's right, paying $40 a tank for the past two years would still come up short after the shenanigans this summer. You could make the case that I'm just tricking myself not to spend that money somewhere else, and you'd be absolutely right. But I also factor the hedge savings into my fuel budget, artificially keeping the price high. Americans set record lows for miles driven this summer, mainly because of the cost per mile. So this should motivate me to drive less and save more, but instead of handing those excesses over to the oil companies I could start saving for my next, more efficient vehicle.

I Should've Played Slots.

I've written about Mint before.  Its a webapp that consolidates all your financial accounts into a one-stop portal.  Newly added to the system is the investment tracker what allows you to see how many thousands of dollars you're losing through no fault of your own.  Pretty nice, huh?  Above is the raw performance of one of my mutual funds with the dollar amounts removed.  But that's not all, you can also see how much money everyone else is losing compared to you.Here's my performance against the Dow Jones over 6 months.  You can see me squeezing out a little more than the average and then, BOOM!  In the tank just like everyone else.  So the take-home here is that you shouldn't worry about how much money you've lost, cause I can nearly guarantee there's someone else who's lost more.  Thanks Mint!

Loose Lips.

Whew, I did it. For the last few weeks I've been participating in a private beta test of a new financial web service called mint. Part of the agreement was that I would refrain from talking, blogging, or basically intimating that I knew what Mint was, what it did, or that it even existed. Luckily I managed to keep my trap shut, as the service launched today at TechCrunch40. So the embargo is off!

Mint is a swank little app that collects spending reports from your various online finance resources. So it compiles spending reports from all your credit cards and whatever bank accounts you supply. (Yeah, its a little creepy giving them all that information but once you get past that its cool. Plus I realized all you can do in my online credit card accounts is pay bills, so what the hell.)

Once you jump in Mint collects all your transactions and starts classifying them into spending groups. It doesn't get them all right off the bat, but its pretty good about recognizing most merchants. From there you can see the breakdown of where your money goes on a month to month scale, and compare your current spending with your average spending in each group.

Overall I think its pretty useful as a little introspection of where you're throwing your money. The last section of the site analyzes your interest rates, cash back and other rewards to recommend ways you could save money. This could use a little work cause it kept recommending I switch one card that I hardly use to a cash back card that I do use. So if you'd like a little clarity in your burning pocket syndrome go check it out, its open to the public.

• Mint