Mint is not the first service to help you manage online but it is one of the most comprehensive and one of the largest online sites for money management on the web. Before it went such sites as intuits quicken and other desktop packaged software.

Just a few days off work can have implications for us all financially not just from a lost income perspective but from the point of additional expense…for example take out meals or medicines which cost seven pounds an item.

So that cheap flu jab from ASDA is looking like a better investment each and everyday.

Here are three double digit shares that you can buy today:

1. France telecom
2. Annaly capital management
3. Santander

What maybe is surprising is that the position number 3 is such a well known company and very sizeable. Some of these companies are offering some of the best returns in decades due in part to the world wide crisis and also now the euro crisis.

Smart services such as Mint have come of age and are now one of the biggest destinations on the web for people to manage their money. Fact is – it helps to have all your numbers and details in one place. Building up a complete snap-shot of your life is crucial for most people, but the services on offer from most banks and building societies are not joined up and hence the user i.e. you is left to pull in all the information from disparate sites in order to build that full complete picture. Mint aims to be a real innovation in this regard and pull in statements and data from your bank directly: so called “screen scraping”. There have been issues with Mint which is US based in porting to the UK.

New services such as money dashboard is targeted at this gap that Mint has left and aims to work with UK and Euro institutions to allow figures to appear all in one place much as Mint aims to do. Money dashboard like Mint aims to be free and has had some success in working with the notoriously closed UK banking sector which is not keen on enabling customers to use third party products to view their accounts.

1. Making money online.

Well yes you can make money online. After all this is where google makes the majority of its money. Google makes money when adverts displayed on publishers websites get clicked on.

The alternative way of making money is via something called affiliate advertising where if I was to help a customer buy a product then I would get a percentage of the sale.

Many of the schemes will be aimed at you being a publisher intent on bringing in revenue from google adsense and or affiliate publishing. This would involve showing you the thousands of pounds made from their sites showing pictures of cheques gained from these tactics.

The scheme will involve building a website and producing traffic that can convert into sales or clicks in a specialist area. It might sound easy but its actually very hard to make even the most well designed website earn just one pound a day. The reason that many people flog this scheme is because they farce often had a way into the market I.e. and that they don’t tell you about. One of those ways is to use a well known and ranked domain and another us to downright cheat by using bots and other tools to generate clicks and traffic. Now most of these tricks won’t get taught and you will simply not find these.

2. Inside knowledge on investments.

This is where individuals or companies claim they can give you inside knowledge on sectors, industries or even housing deals.

The fact is they cannot. What they attempt to sell is in fact often common knowledge. Some share schemes show great profits because the meer act of promoting a share leads to a price rise in the share which bouys the price further.

3. Property investments.

Lets split this into certain themes:

Bmv means below market value. The idea is that a company will source properties on your behalf if the numbers stack up to a healthy rental income. For example a group of developers might offload property this way and see this as an attractive way to dress up an investment. The end buyer thinks he or she is getting a discount, but in reality valuations based on non existant properties or properties that have never rented is dubious. Be careful here because the broker simply wants their commision from the sales and any other associated products or services that you may use.

The other scheme is to take advantage of the distressed property around the world. Some prices have dropped to mere fractions of their worth at their peak. Again brokers are happy to sell you distressed portfolios of property very nicely packaged and often with tenants.

You must be careful that these headline rents dont result from temporary or dishonest tenancy agreements where tenants are subsidized to take on expensive rents.

4. Gambling.

There are those who can tell you how to build systems that well best the system or market. From horse racing to dog racing we know of no way of making these systems consistently return income like those commonly advertised.

Yes there are professional gamblers and some of these are companies and they do make money from entities such as the tote. But these systems employ many people using large amounts of capital…not something you can replicate from home.

1. Never be too keen or desperate to move into a place.

2. Always ask lots of questions about the property and costs or agency fees. Ask as much as you can and chase up where the agent or landlord might sting you.

3. Ask for at least 10 percent off the monthly price. Ask the agent to ask the landlord.

4. Try reducing the agency fees. The agent will take a monthly comission too so upfront fees can sometimes be reduced.

As potential first time buyers struggle to achieve the mortgage deposit for their own home and turn to renting, could this be kick starting the renting market creating pressure on would be renters and hence increasing prices.

Many estate agents are noticing that their rentals are by far the busiest departments as sales dry up. However it would seem that the buy to let investors are competing with would be first time buyers for the very same properties.

So with pressure on the rental market which is raising rents as prices fall, yields go up leading more and more investors back into the market.

Payday loans are somewhat equivalent to the pawn shops of yesteryear where short term loans enable borrowers very short loans of the order of days, weeks or months. So could the pawn shops days be numbered once again?

One way is to invest in property but another is to consider the high rates of return on offer from dividend yielding stocks. There are some amazing stocks that are offering double digit returns from some well known companies such as Santander and Nokia. You can find such high yielding stocks by using such tools as google finance. Using the slider you can select properties you are looking for such as market cap, pe ratios and eps.

So before you consider putting your money in the bank to get interest, consider investing in the shares of the bank.

Two well known listed companies are paying out dividends of over 10%. Compared to paltry rates in the bank, investing in shares could over as much as 5 times or even 100 times the tiny interest rates on offer by most banks.

These two well known companies are Nokia and Santander. Amazing, because these are record highs and such house hold names. Watch out for the dividend being slashed though.