Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with accounts

Keeping moneys separate

Precision — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 21:14:19 -0800

What's the best way to keep my summer income separate from my savings? It's the summer between high school and university, and through scholarships (I'm a National Merit Scholar) and working quite a few hours at a part time job during high school, I've managed to save up enough to pay for the entirety of my first year of college, and likely the rest.

I quit my job upon graduating, promptly got bored with my idle time, and got a job waiting tables. I'd like to keep this money separate from my savings/checking accounts at Chase, and either use it at the end of the summer to buy a nice guitar, pay for a trip to Europe, or any number of things. I'm honestly only working right now for the fun of it.

I figure I have a few options: 1) Just tag all the income on Mint as "Summer Income" and tally it that way. 2) Open up another savings account at Chase with my first $300 in income and keep it separate that way. 3) Open up an account at Wells Fargo ($100 minimum balance, no monthly fee for college students) and keep it all over there to ensure it doesn't get mixed in with my money.

What's the most painfree way to do this?

Putting all my eggs in a basket.

bradly — Wed, 20 May 2009 10:40:23 -0800

I'm going to be away from a computer for a couple years and am tangled in every corner of the internet. What should I do to insure it's all here when I get back? I have a website which will obviously have to have domain renewal, etc., but I'm paranoid about certain accounts being deactivated after a period of not being used. Here's a list:

Askmefi
Gmail
Myspace Music
Facebook
Twitter
Stumbleupon
Flickr
Blogger
Tumblr
Soundclick
Mediafire
Youtube

Are there any other steps I should take on the internet before I leave?

thanks in advance.

I'm not asking you to do my research for me buuuuut....

The Whelk — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 10:51:40 -0800

Emergency Research Materials Needed: Due to not being an adult about things I now have to write a quick story set during the Indian Rebellion of 1857. And I have to finish it by Sunday. Yes, I've already read Wikipedia. I've got some knowledge of Indian/British politics and daily life of the time period, but I'd like more. Cause of the time limit, I'm leaning more towards shorter or more digestible accounts of the period. What are some good websites focused on the 1850s in India? What articles should I read? Where do I even find them?

Anything about daily life or habits would be greatly appreciated

New Mac Setup

Admiral Haddock — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 09:56:33 -0800

OK, so my new Mac will arrive next week. Can power users fill me in on best practices for setting it up? I've used Macs for a looooong time now, but I think I've really lost touch with how they should be set up. I am currently running off of a first-generation MacBook where everything is set up on a single admin user (without a password--ugh).

So, starting from scratch, I'd like to set this up with an admin user, a user for me, and a guest user with limited privileges (but full access to iTunes and innocuous stuff). I've read the great tutorial on from this post already, but I still have (possibly stupid) questions that I'd love your thoughts on.

1) I presume I'll use migration assistant to get everything I want from the MacBook over to the Mac Pro. Do I set up an administrator first and then add the MacBook account as a new user? Or set up administrator and a new user, and import to the new user account directly? I've never used different accounts before--do you install programs while logged in as the administrator and then set which users have access? Or install as the user (with the admin password)? If you install as a user, can the administrator then share with the other accounts?

2) What about security? This thread has a lot of advice I hope to follow. But a couple other questions: I expect my home directory for the user account will be about 300-500 GB. Is Filevault able to decrypt/encrypt large directories on the fly, or does it get choked up? Does it make more sense just to use encryption on certain subfolders, rather than the whole user directory? If so, what program? Should I be setting up an Open Firmware password? Or is this just overkill?

3) Would it make sense to keep all of my documents on a second drive in one of the extra bays, so that I can yank the personal stuff if I ever have to send in the machine?

4) What about installing Windows? I think I'm assuming I might install it with Bootcamp, but I have an old version of Parallels I might upgrade to the latest and greatest. Is it safer to install Windows on a dedicated drive? How does Windows (either in Boot Camp or in virtualization) play with multiple accounts/security settings?

I'd definitely like to set up the new machine right the first time. Thanks in advance for your input!

Do I open a USD bank account or a CAD one?

Imperfect — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 17:45:22 -0800

I'm opening a new sole proprietorship in Canada that will be dealing with Americans and American companies. Should I open a USD bank account, or a Canadian one? Theoretically, the answer is easy: USD. But, so far as I can consider, my actual transactions won't be to or from that account. My income will be through a merchant account (which WILL be in USD) and my expenses will be paid via credit card (personal, CAD card to start with, business USD card in time).

I'm really new to this and I can't even really think of many pros or cons for either choice. I guess having a CAD account will make taxes easier? Maybe? Help!

Being discreet online

Anonymous — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 15:33:51 -0800

I would like to write & sell erotica online. What do I need to know about maintaining my privacy? There are four things in particular that I'd like to keep anonymous/discreet:

1. Receiving & sending money online
2. An anonymous email address that I'd rather not have linked with my current one, but perhaps a bit more sturdy than temporary emails (particularly for replies)
3. Anonymous webhosting & domain names (I can be on a subdomain of another site if need be)
4. Possible ads, with payment to the anon account in #1

How do people that deal with selling sexual media online maintain their privacy? Are there central agencies that take care of this for you, or can you do this yourself?

I'm doing this for a bit of fun, so I'm not expecting tons of money, but some info on how to get this going would be great!

Is there a way to merge accounts for the iPhone?

kingfisher, his musclebound cat — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 16:07:27 -0800

I bought an app under one mac account, but have sense changed mac accounts (because of .mac / me.com login issues). I would like to migrate this application and others to the new account, and not pay for them again. How might I accomplish this? Note: I know I could switch to the old account on the phone and download them, but that solution would force to switch accounts to upgrade too. So the solution is not ideal.

Why do I have to create an account?

alms — Sat, 27 Dec 2008 21:16:25 -0800

Why do an increasing number of e-commerce sites force me to set up an account, including an e-mail address and a password, as part of the checkout process. I understand (and don't mind) when this is optional. But when a store forces me to set up an account and give them a password before they will sell me a product (or accept a donation, even) I find it obnoxious. This seems to be more and more common.

Skype meet Facebook. Facebook meet Skype

rileyray3000 — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 13:49:16 -0800

A lot of people in my facebook friends have Skype. Is there a simple way to just do a search for those friends who have it in their profile? I just started using skype. On the info page for a lot of my facebook friends, I've noticed that quite a few of them list their skype addresses. Unfortunately the process is, look at a friend, go to their info page, see if they have skype, cut and paste.

There's got to be a faster way.

Is there some sort of advanced search that just lets you see who among your facebook contacts is of the skype kind? Or has someone else come up with a nifty mini program to do so?

Accessing Admin's Music from a Limited Account

sjuhawk31 — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 07:31:37 -0800

MacFilter: How can I set up a user account that has access to my music on iTunes but nothing else? My family has asked me to bring my laptop and speakers to Thanksgiving dinner tonight. I'd like to set up my MacBook in a "kiosk-like" mode that allows iTunes to run (with access to my music folder) but nothing else. I have the first part of it set up: I created an account that is limited to use of iTunes. But when I launch it there's no music because that user's home folder doesn't have my files. How can I share that across users so I can let my relatives criticize my taste in music?

Where should I put my savings?

snarfois — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 15:08:43 -0800

Should my savings be in a tax-free ISA or in a normal savings account with higher balance and higher interest? (I'm terrible at accounting maths.) In the UK we have tax-free savings accounts, called ISAs, into which you can deposit maximum £3600 per year. I have one of those with about £5000 in it, earning 3.5% interest.

I also have a normal (taxed) savings account, earning 4.5% interest, with about £30,000 in it.

My question is: Should I
a) gradually (£3600 per year) move the money from the normal savings account to the tax-free ISA, or
b) move everything from the ISA into the normal savings account, since the higher balance and higher interest will more than compensate for the taxation

I suspect (b), which makes me wonder what's the point of ISAs.

(Unrelated to the question, I realise those aren't the best interest rates on the market currently. As is always the case, they were, a few years ago when I opened the accounts. I should probably move banks again. But my essential question remains.)

(Also unrelated, I realise these are low-yielding, boring investments as I am a risk-averse investor, and there may be better things I could do with my savings.)

How do I tell my Mac that I'm me?

grumblebee — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 07:17:27 -0800

Question about changing my terminal prompt (and other matters) in an OS X Bash shell. I'm not the most experienced Unix guy, but I can usually figure things out. But this one has me stumped: I just got a slightly-used Macbook Pro. The previous ower -- Michael -- gave me his admin password. So I went into System Preferences, Accounts and created a new admin, grumblebee. Then I deleted Michael.

All went well until I opened terminal, where I saw that the prompt looked like this:

michaels-mackbook-pro: ~Grumblebee

(I know that ~Grumblebee isn't part of the prompt. I just wanted to show you that I'm logged in as me and it's finding my home directory. It's just the prompt that's wrong.)

I tried to edit etc/baschrc, but it said I didn't have permission.

How can I change the prompt and is it likely I'll encounter any other problems connected to changing users?

I need a German savings account

cmonkey — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 05:01:20 -0800

What's the best account for saving money in Germany? I have no savings right now, and that makes me a little worried.

In the US I would stick $100 a month into a money market savings account, but Deutsche Bank, my daily bank, requires a €5000 initial deposit, which I do not have, and their normal savings account only has a 0.50% interest rate which is a little low. I asked some coworkers for advice, but they could only suggest a Bausparkonto which I guess would penalize me for withdrawls.

So I ask you, friends of the internet, where is the best place to stick a few hundred euros a month with a minimal initial deposit, low hassle for transfers out of a German bank account, and no penalties for withdrawing money?

Do US charities have public accounts?

twine42 — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 05:05:18 -0800

How can I, as a UK citizen, get to see what a US charity is spending its money on? Do US Charities have to make their accounts public? I'm not after knowing how much the director gets, or how much they spend on paperclips every year, but the public line of "we spend 10% on admin and the rest on doing good" isn't filling me with confidence. How do I get a better idea of what they're doing with the other 90% when the charity themselves is ignoring my requests for the data?

Sharing preferences between accounts

jeffburdges — Sun, 21 Sep 2008 17:22:20 -0800

A few Mac questions : (1) Why does Mail.app randomly fail to mark some messages as read? (2) Can one block some websites from Safari from one admin account without blocking them from other accounts? (2 continued) Yes, I know the admin account can reverse it, the goal is merely that people access those sites from another account. Fyi, even if the account was not admin, parental controls only lets you allows specific sites.

(3) Has anyone successfully shared an iTunes library between accounts, not just the music, but the library data itself, like ratings and smart playlists. No, I've not yet just tried pointing them at the same directories and configuring the permissions to allow both to write to them. I'd also love sharing Adium, Skype, and Mail.app configurations too.

Windows XP demands User Account password that doesn't exist.

Deflagro — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 14:00:00 -0800

My Windows XP randomly asks for a password for the User Accounts when there is no password, but will accept a blank password field. How do I fix this? This started about 6 months ago. It will do this for several weeks and then sometimes stop for a week or so. The only problem with this, if I try to Switch Users (not Log Off), it will demand a password and not accept that there is no password. I cannot log back on to the running account, nor to any other accounts, I just have to perform a hard-shutdown. Since this is a shared computer, (none of the accounts have passwords) one person can't leave a program running and let someone else switch users and is forced to either stop the program, or just use that person's Account.

All accounts are set to Administrator if that makes a difference. It has always been like that and we haven't had this problem before. Also when I open Manage User Accounts in the Control Panel it says that there is not any passwords for any accounts. Anyone else have this problem? How do I fix this?

Wait; EVERYONE's an Admin now?

bartleby — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 17:15:12 -0800

All users on this Terminal Server seem to be Administrators. How do I downgrade them? I could spend a a whole lot of unbillable time researching this, but I'll consult the hive mind instead. I am lazy.

Helping someone with a terminal server (Windows Server 2003 R2) in their environment, which is in a configuration that's new to me.

Every account I log in to the TS with, Power User, Admin level, whatever, is coming up with the "Configure Your Server Wizard"; which would indicate that every single user account is an Administrator on this machine. WTF??

It could be a local setting on that server, it could be somehting in the AD for the domain, or something I don't know. Unfortunately, I don't have the time to hunt around for what it might be.

Any suggestions on where to start?

Need accounting software design with IT consulting in mind

Merdryn — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 07:58:03 -0800

I've been struggling to find accounting software, online or PC/Mac based (either will do) that is suitable for a computer consulting practice. I need to be able to handle the typical basic things done by QuickBooks, like invoicing and estimates, simple A/R and A/P reports, etc. But that isn't enough. I need to manage multiple bill rates on a per consultant/per customer/per job or work order basis. QuickBooks doesn't do that, and I've tried hard to find out how to make that work. Any advice, hive mind?

Drive by downloads: how to prevent

bbranden1 — Wed, 08 Aug 2007 11:28:13 -0800

"Drive by downloads": Looking for a program or technique to prevent them, other than creating a limited user account in Windows XP. I've tried setting up a user account with limited privileges to protect my computer from "drive by downloads" while surfing, but find it too limiting: I can't run certain programs (e.g. Acronis backup program) or erase some files, and my mouse pad settings get fouled up when switching back and forth from an administrator account, unless I do a total reboot.

So is there a technique, setting, or a program, that would allow me to pick and choose which limitations I put on the XP user account? For instance, disallow program installations but allow erasing files and running certain programs.

System: Windows XP, sp2, and my browser is Firefox. I believe some former MSFT employees may have developed something for IE, but I prefer to stick with Firefox.

HSBC and Multiple Buckets

icebourg — Sat, 02 Jun 2007 19:18:31 -0800

Is there an easy way to open multiple online savings accounts with HSBC Direct? I love ING Direct's website, and one feature I particularly like is how easy they make it to have a bunch of savings accounts set up. I usually use them as short-to-medium term "buckets" that I can put in various amounts for different goals. For instance, I might have an account just for expected car repairs, and another for a piece of software I'm saving up to buy. Since I already have an account, opening a new account takes about 3 seconds and the new account gets fully integrated with the rest of my accounts. It's quite spiffy and solved a lot of the problems I've had with money management in the past. (not [easily] knowing how much I had set aside for what purpose)

Although my account was unaffected, I got spooked by ING's closing thousands of electric orange accounts and decided to try out some of the other offerings out there. So how can I replicate my ING setup with HSBC?

I went to their online savings signup page, but the options are "New Customer/Set Up Online Savings(or Online Payment)" and "Existing Customer/Online Payment." Their website seems like its set up to manage multiple accounts, so how can I set up additional online savings accounts without going through the whole application process again?

Their online payment account seems to be their answer to ING's Electric Orange account, and I'm only interested in savings accounts for now.

How to block access to my online college account, even for me?

Betty_effn_White — Thu, 04 Jan 2007 10:55:48 -0800

Ok, so my college grades weren't the best. Is there any way to disable access to my online grades? My dad has been nagging me for my grades, which are terrible for a myriad of reasons I won't bore you with. He is a very explosively angry man. I would rather avoid the screaming match until Sunday, when I will be safely back on the opposite coast and I can clean up my mess a little bit. Calmly explaining why I did so poorly (one C, one W, and one no pass) is out of the question.

Is there any way to temporarily disable access to my online account (my.pcc.edu)? Maybe some kind of blocker that will make the website look broken from the home's IP?

I would like to be able to hangout with my dad without the hive inducing anxiety that he will discover my grades.

Please no "you dug your own grave" responses. I will tell him, but at a time when my progress is evident and not seemingly empty promises.

Print quotas for a small mixed network

spitbull — Tue, 26 Dec 2006 13:47:13 -0800

What is the most striaghtforward solution for setting up user accounts with quotas for printing on a small closed office network, mixed Mac OSX 10.4 (mostly, PPC and one Intel) and Windows XP (one machine), printing to a HP 3390 laser all-in-one? I'm looking for something with simple browser interface, individual user accounts with quotas that require a user to log in to print from *any* machine on the network, which I suppose means a dedicated print server acting as a gateway to the HP. It could be router-based, or it could run on the Windows XP box or any of the Macs (I'd prefer it on the Intel iMac, which is where I administer most of the network from). I can use OS X server on the iMac, but it seems like overkill for this purpose. Thoughts?

How to setup W2K3 to allow users to manage user accounts without being an admin?

Spoonman — Mon, 24 Jul 2006 12:54:35 -0800

I've got a web server that we've just put into our DMZ. I need to be able to grant the web developers the ability to manage user accounts, but I don't want them to be administrators (in other words: regular users who can manage other user accounts: change passwords, create new ones, delete old ones, etc). Since the machine is in the DMZ, I can't use "Account Operators" since that's a domain group. It appears that members of the Power Users group can maintain accounts, but only the ones that particular user created. I seem to remember doing this in the NT days, but that was a long time ago. :)

The reason is they never created a method of managing content for this box, so I've had to come up with some creative ways of giving them access. They use local box authentication to log in their customers (it's in the works to change all this, but the server had to go in now), and I don't want me or my group to have to maintain these accounts. They set it up wrong, let them do the work. But, since they're developers, I don't want them having admin rights, either.

Anyone? It's close to the end of the day and my Google-Fu has reached its limit for the day...

Transfering large sums of money

monkeyJuice — Sat, 01 Jul 2006 06:40:59 -0800

I want to open a savings account here in the UK for my god-daughter who lives in Australia. What hidden taxes and other nasty surprises can I expect when I transfer it to her when she's 18... if its even possible.

How do I transfer Gmail to Gmail?

thefinned1 — Wed, 01 Mar 2006 10:10:11 -0800

How do I transfer all my email from one Gmail account to another Gmail acocunt? I have two Gmail accounts one is my screen name @ gmail and another using fistname.lastname @ gmail. I want to transfer all the email in one account to the other.

My ultimate goal is to drop (delete) my screen name account and use only my firstname.lastname account.

There seems to be lots of apps for converting other email formats to Gmail but nothing going from Gmail to Gmail.

I really don't want to have to forward everything. And I'm tired to my email being emailed "on behalf" of another version of myself.

Anyone have any ideas?