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Thousands of Web sites offer to help manage your money, but we've found few that deliver. So we tapped our staff to name their favorite sites for brief, clear, no-nonsense advice.
Take in the big picture. How healthy is the economy? To get a quick answer, you could find the elusive one-armed economist (so he can't say, "on the other hand ..."), or you could get the skinny from Martin Capital, a Texas investment adviser. The site rates the Conference Board's list of leading economic indicators -- including building permits, factory orders and consumer expectations -- as either positive or negative. The site also shows more than 30 timely economic stats, such as retail sales and consumer credit, and then color-codes them to indicate whether they are better or worse than expected. Alan Greenspan could use the site to bone up for Federal Reserve meetings.
If you'd like some commentary to go with this broad summary, we recommend Outside the Box. Texas investment adviser John Mauldin culls newsletters, reports and articles for interesting, contrasting and well-written points of view on the economy and financial markets.
Enter the blogosphere. In a sea of financial sites, these Web-based diaries are mostly flotsam and jetsam. But many gems exist. Among our favorites are Random Roger's Big Picture, written by Roger Nusbaum, an Arizona investment adviser, who offers market commentary and portfolio advice. Another is penned by Slash, who says he is a San Francisco investment manager. Slash writes the more trading-oriented Inventing Money. If you want to plumb the blogosphere depths yourself, start at the Stock Market Blog Resource Page.
Read all about it. Your next stop should be a financial portal -- a one-stop supermarket for information about almost any stock. Our favorite is Yahoo Finance, where the information is free and easy to find. Here you can get price quotes, analysts' earnings estimates, news headlines, quarterly and annual financial results, and much more.
Narrow your choices. When you're ready to begin applying your knowledge to the markets, you'll need a stock screener to identify companies that fit your investment criteria. Pardon our bias, but we like the Kiplinger.com screener, which lets you sift through 3,000 stocks to find any combination of 27 characteristics. Another top screener is at MSN Money, although it works only on PCs running Windows.
Find the best funds. For mutual fund facts (including historical returns), a basic fund screener and helpful fund-investing advice, go to Morningstar. For $125 annually, Morningstar's premium service offers in-depth analysis of individual funds, a better fund screener and stock research as well. What Morningstar lacks is a sense of timeliness -- and a sense of humor. For those, head to FundAlarm, where proprietor Roy Weitz's witty monthly column cuts through the industry's public-relations baloney to tell you which funds are catering properly to shareholders and which ones aren't. He also tracks comings and goings of fund managers, so you can ditch a fund if its star manager leaves.
Bank on these bond prices. Bond-price information has always been much harder to come by than stock quotes, but that's changing. Investing in Bonds, created by the bond industry's trade group, offers a free, searchable database of the latest government, corporate, municipal and mortgage-backed bond prices, sorted in a variety of ways. You'll also find bond indexes, yield-curve data and fixed-income primers -- enough to make this the only bond-investing site you'll need.
Protect what you have. For life insurance, our favorites are Insure.com, AccuQuote and InsWeb. They quickly provide price quotes from most of the top life-insurance companies. And because the sites ask enough questions about you, your medical condition, hobbies and travel, they generally match you up with a policy for which you'll qualify. Insure.com also lists each policy's underwriting criteria (what you need to do to qualify), which can be difficult to find.
For health insurance, we prefer eHealthInsurance, which provides price quotes from many companies.
For auto insurance, head to InsWeb, which quotes prices from some of the top companies. But you'll also want to visit www.statefarm.com, www.progressive.com and www.allstate.com because they're not covered by InsWeb.
Get carded. Cash may be king, but credit is a close runner-up. And the best site for finding a new credit card is CardWeb.com. It's easy to use, and it has a huge listing of low-rate, no-fee, rewards and premium cards. CardWeb provides the introductory rate, if applicable; the interest rate and whether it is fixed or variable; any annual fee; and links to an online application form on the credit-card issuer's site. Click on the card name and you're given the grace period and what you'll pay in additional fees for such things as cash advances and over-limit charges.
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