DailyFinance

Although it often requires a little more patience and time, booking one-way tickets separately rather than buying a standard round-trip ticket can offer better control over both price and itinerary.

It's call remote deposit capture technology, and you've probably seen it advertised: Snap a smartphone picture of a check, send the image to the bank, and your deposit gets credited. Easy. And while only 3% of banking customers use it now, it could be the killer app that lures most of us into online banking.

Even as total outstanding student debt rises to $1 trillion, lawmakers have yet to allow loans to be discharged in bankruptcy. Without an escape clause, these loans can strangle a person. Take 36-year-old Nick Keith, who remains $142,000 eight years after graduating from culinary school.

Cyberspace is full of scams, and the con artists keep developing new ones. One of the latest is "smishing": It's like a phishing email that comes as a text message on your cell phone, and there's more than one way it can cost you.

A lot of ordinary investors lost money in the Facebook IPO. But the true tragedy relates to the crazy expectations that many people had about the IPO in the first place, and how it may impact their retirement planning.

One of the hardest decisions parents have to make is whether to put money toward their kids' college educations or toward their own retirement. But as emotionally charged as it may be, the answer is a no-brainer.

Microsoft's Windows 8, with its Metro user interface, is designed to work on PCs, tablets, phones, and even game machines. Win or lose, it's the biggest rollout Microsoft has had since Windows 3.0 more than 20 years ago, and an entire industry is on the line.