I’m a huge fan on online banking. In fact, we opened our first online savings account with ING Direct over five years ago, and we haven’t looked back since. Sure, we still have a local brick and mortar bank for convenience, but we keep the vast majority of our savings online. Why? Because online banks offer significantly higher interest rates than do their local competitors.

With the banking world back into doom-and-gloom mode, safety is the name of the game for investors and savers. Many of those looking to keep large amounts of cash safe have fled to 10-year Treasury bonds, which were yielding about 2.18% on Jan. 15. Of course, those investors face some capital risk if they sell the bonds. To play it even more safely, investors may consider three-month T-bills, but they were only yielding 0.10%. Six-month bills yielded 0.72%.

Scammers love to use current events to dupe consumers, and today's ongoing financial turmoil offers the perfect opportunity for one of the most popular forms of fraud -- phishing. A phishing scam typically uses a phony e-mail to collect your personal or financial information under false pretenses. Its recent growth prompted the Federal Trade Commission, or FTC, to issue a warning in October that electronic thieves may be using Wall Street's woes for their Internet trickery.

Success has many fathers; failure is an orphan. Then there is Bank of America’s acquisition of Merrill Lynch, a deal skating dangerously close to the definition of failure after last week’s announcement that BofA would take $24 billion more in government support from the U.S. Treasury and Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., in addition to a $118 billion backstop for bad debts.

Why pay people for your own money? Via FatWallet, here's a big daddy list of all the banks that refund your ATM fees, regardless of who owns the ATM.

Consumerist simplifies CNBC's list of the 25 failed banks of 2008. It was a bad year for banks you've never heard of. Can someone add up the total cost to the FDIC for me?

With the upcoming tax free savings/investment account in 2009, my mind has been racing about what exactly to do with the account. Between my wife and I, we will have $10,000 worth of contribution room available to us in the first year which we intend to fully maximize. How do we intend to use the account? I’ve written a few ideas in the original TFSA column which I’m going to expand on below.

In the past, we’ve discussed the best online high-yield savings account, covered the basics of certificates of deposit, and even explored the beauty of Roth IRAs. But we’ve never talked about checking accounts. Many people believe checking accounts are the dinosaurs of the banking world. They’re not extinct yet. In the past few weeks, I’ve received two questions about them:

Some experts say that ATM card fraud is on the rise, so it’s important to follow a few simple steps to protect yourself. What’s scary is that you could be at risk even if your ATM card is never actually physically stolen, as crooks can use skimming devices and keyboard overlays to steal your card information digitally when you withdraw cash from an ATM. Here are some tips to protect your money:

The financial world was fixated on Capitol Hill as Congress battled over the Bush administration's request for a $700 billion bailout of the banking industry. In the midst of this late-September drama, the Treasury Department issued a five-sentence notice that attracted almost no public attention. But corporate tax lawyers quickly realized the enormous implications of the document: Administration officials had just given American banks a windfall of as much as $140 billion.