Finding the best airfares

Step 1 - Choose the destination

The Sunday Journal recently ran a story on finding the lowest airfares. It lays out the process of finding those cheap fares, beginning with a site where the traveler can choose his destination.

Farecompare.com is a good first stop for leisure travelers with flexible travel dates or locations. You may want to visit the Caribbean sometime this summer, for example, without having a particular city in mind.

The Getaway Maps link mentioned in the article is located here. I started by selecting the airport I wanted to fly out of. I could also have chosen a city, and used all the surrounding airports as the starting point. Then I was able to select from a general region (Europe, Caribbean, Mexico, etc.) and get a list of the destinations from cheapest to most expensive. I chose New York as my starting point, and the Caribbean as my destination. Then I drilled down into Bonaire, and the site showed me what month of the year had the cheapest flights (January, February, March and April, which seems counterintuitive since that's the high season in the Caribbean.)

Step 2 - Choose how soon to go

After choosing the destination, the next step in the article is selecting when to buy the tickets.

Farecast.com helps travelers time the ticket purchase once they've decided on a destination.

[...]

Travelers can get a graph showing fare history on a select route, along
with a prediction of whether they should buy now or wait a few days.

Farecast didn't have predictions on ticket price changes for a trip to Bonaire. However, it did list about 50 or 60 other cities where I could get predictions on ticket prices over the next 90 days. Most of the destinations were domestic. The site has a pretty straightforward interface. Having used many online flight search tools, it was easy to figure out.

Step 3 - Get a refund if the ticket price drops

Finally, after purchasing the ticket, the article notes a site that can help you get a refund if the ticket price falls. This is especially relevant for the leisure traveler who may be purchasing the tickets far in advance.

Yapta.com, launched this year, watches fares for specific flights. A handful of airlines, like United andAmerican, will sometimes issue credits if the fare drops after the ticket
purchase.

Yapta keeps tabs on users' itineraries and sends an email when fares dip, so they can circle back to the airline and ask for a voucher or partial refund.

The link to check on refunds is here.

All in all, an informative article with some good tips.

How to get free financial planning advice - part 2

This is the second in an occasional series on getting free financial planning advice (part 1).

Last time I looked into American Century. This time I'll go over T. Rowe Price's free benefits (I'm using a list of mutual fund companies from Morningstar as my starting point) . All information is from the company Web site.

T. Rowe Price

Program Name: Advisory Planning Services/Select Client Services

Assets Needed: $500,000 for Advisory Planning Services, or $100,000 in new assets. $1,000,000 for Select Client Services

Type of advisor: Advisory counselor and Advisory planning services team

Frequency of advisements: Ongoing consultations

Fee benefits: waiver on small account fee

URL: http://www.troweprice.com/common/index3/0,3011,lnp%253D10129%2526cg%253D970%2526pgid%253D11221,00.html

Multiple trustees

Here's another article I read as I research trusts (free WSJ Digg link). More trusts are being set up with multiple trustees.

Increasingly, however, families are "slicing and dicing" trustee duties, says Dennis Belcher, a trust lawyer with McGuireWoods LLP in Richmond, Va. Families are specifying that one trustee, typically an institutional trust company, hold custody of the assets and handle the administrative trustee duties. Meanwhile, another fiduciary -- often a family investment committee -- has the authority to direct investments. Trust creators are also naming separate trustees to handle distributions to beneficiaries.

Better rates on cash

I know all about the online savings accounts offered by HSBC Direct, EmigrantDirect, or ING Direct. An article in BusinessWeek led me to a site where I found better rates on cash than those offered by these online savings accounts. From the article:

Like many retirees, John Urban shops for the best rates on the CDs and money-market accounts that make up a large chunk of his portfolio. The 65-year-old Bristol (R.I.) resident scours the Internet looking for banks offering the highest yields, but lately he often finds the best deals at an online auction run by Zions Direct, a division of Salt Lake City-based Zions First National Bank.

At Zionsdirect.com, the company generally runs five auctions a week of $1,000 CDs, typically with 1- to 18-month maturities. Since debuting on Feb. 27, it has conducted 59 auctions, approximately 60% of which have netted participants rates above the highest available at the time on Bankrate.com, which tracks rates nationwide, according to Bankrate's own analysis. Urban, who purchased CDs in six auctions so far, says he checks advertised rates at local banks and on Bankrate.com and then submits a bid for a slightly higher yield. "You win some and you lose some, but the rates I've gotten I wasn't able to find elsewhere."

I did a quick comparison of the latest rates Zions displayed on https://www.auctions.zionsdirect.com/, and they generally seemed at or higher than the best rates I could find through bankrate.com. The calendar of upcoming or in progress auctions is located at https://www.auctions.zionsdirect.com/calendar.

With CDs, the cash put in is generally tied up until the CD matures. Presumably this won't be an issue for the mass affluent segment with a high level of liquid investible assets. I can also spread out the investment over several CDs, investing say 1/6 of the cash in a 6 month CD every month for 6 months, and then rolling over the cash if it wasn't needed. If it was needed, there would be a CD maturing every month which would provide cash.