Build Credit by Using the Right Prepaid Credit Cards [Personal Finance]

By Melanie Pinola Oct 18, 2011 7:30 AM 13,815 23

Recent regulations have made it harder for credit card companies to prey on people with no credit history (like college students and immigrants)—a good thing. But what if you do want a credit card and to establish a credit history?

Forbes suggests applying for a prepaid card, which offers several benefits: no credit history requirements, possible cash-back incentives, and no late fees or worries about exceeding your credit limits (because you're limited to the prepaid amount). However, you'll want to check that the specific prepaid card builds credit by reporting to the credit bureaus; some like the Capital One Reloadable Prepaid MasterCard do not, while the Bancorp Bank Purple Diamond Prepaid Visa RushCard does (though it charges an activation fee). Check the chart at Credit Land for the ones that say build credit. You'll note that most of these cards have high APRs, so make sure you pay off the balance in full each month.

There are other ways to build good credit without credit cards and credit scores aren't everything, but, like it or not, your credit history does influence your financial future, so it pays to understand and build your credit as best you can. Photo by Phil Campbell.

Perfect Ways to Obtain a Credit Card with No Credit | Forbes

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How to Get a Siri-Like Personal Assistant on Your Android Phone for Free [Android]

If you watched last week's iPhone 4S announcement with your Android phone and went a little green with envy when Siri, iOS's new voice-recognizing personal assistant, was announced and demoed on stage, buck up. You've got a lot of great voice recognition apps to choose from on Android that can help you keep up with friends, look up the weather, find local businesses, and more. Here are a look at your options.

If you haven't looked into voice recognition apps on Android before, you may be surprised at how many applications get the job done. None of the apps currently available for Android are quite as well integrated with the OS as Siri is be with iOS (sorry), but some of them come closer than others, and you can bet that all of them will be updated and improved now that Siri is available for iOS. Best of all, they're all free.

If you have an Android phone, you already have Google Voice Actions for Android installed. When everyone got their first look at Siri on the iPhone 4S, most people jumped to the assumption that Siri was just Voice Actions for iOS. That's not true—Siri does more than Voie Actions, but Voice Actions is the closest thing Android users to a voice-operated personal assistant.

Pros: Voice Actions can control a large swath of Android functions. You can place phone calls, listen to music by track name, artist, or album, send SMS or email messages, get driving and turn-by-turn navigation directions, search the web, and more. If you're clever, you can get information like weather, word definitions, maps and information about local businesses, and more just by using voice actions intelligently. For example, tap the Voice Actions icon and speak "weather in Washington, DC," Voice Search will do a Google search for it, and Google's mobile page will give you an interactive display of the weather forecast.

Cons: The trouble with Voice Actions is that it's only well integrated with core Android functions. You won't be able to schedule calendar appointments, schedule appointments with other people, update Twitter or Facebook, or issue complex commands that require passing information to any application other than Google Search. Additionally, you need to actually tap the Voice Search icon (or long-press the search key) every time you want to issue a request, which makes it less than ideal for hands-free situations, like when you're driving. Finally, Voice Search is a simple command-response application, as in, you speak a command and it replies with whatever it has. If it's wrong, you reissue the command by starting over. There's no back-and-forth with Voice Actions.

Vlingo has been around for a long time, much longer than voice control has been in-style on smartphones. Vlingo has text-to-speech and speech-to-speech clients for iOS, Android, BlackBerry, Nokia, and Windows Mobile, and while none of them have particularly deep integration with their respective operating system, the app does reach beyond core applications and comes closest to the kind of back-and-forth with advanced commands that Siri offers.

Pros: Vlingo allows you to do all of the basics: you can send SMS messages and emails, place phone calls, and search the web. You can also search for local businesses and restaurants using natural language, so saying "find pizza" will search for local pizza delivery restaurants. Saying "taxi" will search for the nearest cab company. You can also launch applications through Vlingo by speaking their name, or update Facebook and Twitter through the app. It's speech-to-text engine is good, and unlike Voice Actions, it rarely misinterpreted my contact names or spoken words.

The developers behind Vlingo have even tossed in some tie-ins to other applications: if you say "find hotels in New York City," the app will ask you if you want to install Kayak or if you just want to search the web. Say "Buy movie tickets for Real Steel in Washington DC," the app will open your default browser, go to Fandango, bring up the page for Real Steel, and offer me showtimes at nearby theaters.

Finally, Vlingo's strongest suit is that you can tell it to start listening as soon as you open the app, and when you enter Vlingo's "in-car" mode, you can say "Hey Vlingo," out loud and the app will accept commands. It's Vlingo's depth of features and its ability to have a back-and-forth conversation with you that make it the closest thing Android users have to Siri. Check out this video to see Vlingo in action.

Cons: The only real problem with Vlingo is that too many of its commands shunt you to other applications that have no voice-activated features. When you're using "in-car" mode, Vlingo will ask you if you want to leave Vlingo to open your browser or another app to complete the action, but it doesn't let you say yes or no from that screen, and you have to touch the screen to either go forward or cancel the operation. The same is true for a number of Vlingo's other features as well. Saying "Check in to China Garden" simply opens Foursquare and does a search for China Garden, which saves time, but falls just a little short.

Also, if you stray too far from any of Vlingo's known search and command terms, you'll confuse it and it'll shunt you to a web search. That's fine in some cases, but the fact that you can't just ask what the weather is without doing a Google search is a little disappointing. Vlingo is great, but the most frustrating thing about the app is that it seems to go so far, only to stop short of perfection.

Edwin is a utility we've covered before, and while it's lacking the bells and whistles of its competition, it adds voice response and speech-to-speech to Google's native voice actions. It also allows you to make your voice commands a bit more conversational. Most of its commands are passed through to Google Voice Actions, where they're executed or the results are spoken back to you.

Pros: Edwin's strength is in how conversational the app is. If it has a direct response, it'll speak it out loud. Ask "What's the weather in Washington DC," and the app will respond aloud with current conditions. Ask about another city, and the app will look it up and respond there as well. You can even ask the app "Where am I," and it'll respond, right down to your block number. The app has a large button you press once to make the app start listening. Best of all, if it understands, it'll respond. If the app needs to do a web search or open an application, it'll prompt you to select an app, or it'll go to the browser and perform a search.

Cons: The big problem with Edwin is that it doesn't have a rich command list of its own, and when it doesn't understand something, it suffers the same problem Voice Actions does: it just fails. The app also has a difficult time processing some commands, like navigation and SMS messages—it'll understand that you want to navigate, and it'll understand that you want to send an SMS message, but it won't pick up where you want to go or who you want to send the message to. The app definitely needs some improvements, and when testing it, I ran into a number of bugs and errors. In some cases, Edwin forgot my location and couldn't retrieve weather information, and in others it stopped being able to obtain weather information entirely. Your mileage with Edwin may vary, but at the very least it'll talk back to you.

SpeakToIt Assistant is a relatively new speech-to-speech and speech-to-text assistant in the Android market. The app prides itself on being customizable, and on giving you a cartoon avatar that you can customize and configure to be your personal assistant. (If you don't like the default sexy librarian, you've got an absurd amount of options for customizing your assistant with a range of other fantasy cartoon options.) The app does have some back-and-forth conversational abilities, and it definitely recognizes a wide array of phrases and commands. The developers behind SpeakToIt claim that it's always learning, and they're working to give the app more commands that it can directly respond to with each update.

Pros: SpeakToIt definitely understands everything that Voice Actions understands and then some. You can ask it to find stock information for you, what the weather is in a far-off place, to send an email or SMS, update your social networks, check-in to a location on Foursquare, and more. The app can also post items to your Evernote account, and it greets you—sometimes with your name after you've said it aloud—when you open the application.

Unlike some of the other applications, you can make your assistant male or female, customize their appearance, and change their voice, albeit slightly. It wins for being the most customizable, and the app with the largest library of in-app commands and pass-through terms. It's clear that the developers of SpeakToIt want you to be able to get as much information as possible inside the app before being shunted to another application or to a Google search. It can even update Facebook and Twitter on your behalf. Check out this video to see SpeakToIt Assistant in action.

Cons: Unfortunately, SpeakToIt Assistant tries very hard to be a personal assistant on the surface that some of the finer touches are lost. SpeakToIt's chosen voice is the default Android voice synthesizer, making it sound more stilted and unnatural than the others, especially when it's trying to hold a conversation with you. Grammar errors in the on-screen text make it difficult to work with at times, and the fact that you have to tap a small microphone button on-screen every time you want to speak to the application difficult to use when driving or if you want a hands-free experience.

Still, SpeakToIt Assistant is in beta, and most of its shortcomings can be easily overcome with additional development. Given that development, the app could grow to be more useful. As it is, it's a touch gimmicky.

If we could only suggest one, Vlingo is definitely the most mature application with its hooks into the most services. It's also the one under the most active development, and the one with the best hands-free and speech-to-speech functionality. However, its competition is hot on its heels.

Google's own Voice Actions is built-in to every Android phone, and its unlikely that Google has any intention of holding still now that Siri will be deeply integrated with iOS. Similarly, SpeakToIt Assistant may be new and still rough around the edges, but it has a lot of potential and it gives you a very personable and customizable caricature to interact with.

The good news for Android users watching Siri's development is that there are plenty of alternatives and options that bring the promise of text-to-speech and speech-to-speech to Android devices. None of them are perfect, and they're not deeply integrated with all of the common features and functions that you would expect from a real voice-activated assistant. Still, there are plenty solid options to give Siri a run for its money, and expect them all to improve very shortly.

You can reach Alan Henry, the author of this post, at alan@lifehacker.com, or better yet, follow him on Twitter or Google+.

Lemon Is an Easy to Use and Free Receipt Tracking Tool for Mobile Phones and Browsers [Personal Finance]

iOS/Android: Keeping track of receipts can be a pain, but Lemon simplifies the process by allowing you to scan in receipts and track your purchases from your phone or online.

Lemon works similar to the previously mentioned Shoeboxed and the already covered Expensify, but with a simplified interface geared more toward personal tracking of finances and expenses on the go. You can scan in any receipts from your Android or iOS phone, and review detailed information about your purchases directly from the app or online. You can also link multiple phones to one account if you're tracking receipts for more than one person. The service breaks down your receipts by the purchase price, tax rate, and expense type. You can view a simple graph of your purchases by month from the webapp or your phone.

Lemon is a bit simpler than Shoeboxed, but if you're looking for an app to keep track of receipts and nothing else, it works well and it's free.

Lemon | via The Next Web

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Where to Turn in the Wake of Debit Card Fees [Personal Finance]

Last week, Bank of America announced they'll start charging $5 per month for using debit cards, and they're not the only ones who do it. Here we'll take a look at which banks are hiking fees, how the fees work, and whether you might want to switch banking institutions.

Bank of America will be enacting this new fee at the start of the year because they report that they will lose almost $2 billion as a result of the Durbin amendment to the federal Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act that went into effect October 1st. The amendment restricts how much a bank can charge a retailer when you pay with their cards. In the past, banks could charge up to 44 cents per swipe. The amendment cuts that by more than 50% to a maximum of 21 cents per swipe plus .05% of the purchase price. Sun Trust already charges a debit card use fee, while Wells Fargo and Chase are "testing" it out. Citigroup has indicated they have no plans to increase fees for using debit cards.

In Bank of America's case, this fee applies to their Basic account holders that make up the majority of their 38.7 million customers that carry a debit card. The fee does not apply to their Platinum or Premium customers. The fee works like this: If you use your card as a debit card, or for any other reason other than taking out cash from an ATM, you will be charged $5 per month whether you use it once or 20 times in that month.

It's not terribly difficult to avoid the fee if you don't mind changing your habits.

The simplest solution is not to use your debit card for purchases and only use it to take out cash at the ATM.Debit cards are a fairly new offering in the history of banking, so consumers can always go back to using checks, cash, and credit cards.Increasing your holdings with a particular bank is an option that could get you into a premium category where this fee is waived. If you have the means, and it is important enough for you to save that $5 per month for the privilege of using your debit card, then pad your coffers with your institution of choice.You also have the option of switching to a credit union or smaller town bank. Typically, these institutions have smaller, or no, fees because they are not driven as much by profit as the bigger banks.

Switching to another banking institution can be a hassle. You'll need to consider the time it takes to set up a new direct deposit with your employer, change linked accounts (such as PayPal), and make sure automatic bill payments occur uninterrupted. Also, smaller banks/credit unions may be cheaper, but they don't always offer the convenience of larger banks. Smaller institutions generally do not have an ATM or branch in every town all over the country. Last, there is no guarantee that other banking institutions will not follow suit with charging these fees. Others already have, and more may follow, as the amendment will impact them as well. Only time will tell.

If you decide to make the change to a different banking institution, here is a guide from fivecentnickel.com to help you with that transition. If you just want to vent and let Bank of America know how you feel, sign this petition over at change.org.

Tell us how you plan to handle fee hikes by your banking institution in the comments below.

Photo by Lewisha Jones.

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