Internet and Finances
As a society, we are just beginning to figure out how much the internet can be a resource in our lives. One significant way has to do with finances.
First of all, the internet makes financial information immediately available. In the 1920s, stock market information was conveyed via telegraph. Now we can get online and find out what the market is doing in close to real time. We can look up any individual stock rather than waiting on a general summary at the close of the day. The results of having this kind of information available have been drastic, creating, for example, the possibility of day trading.
Through the internet we can also find out where we stand almost instantaneously on almost any type of investment or debt we carry. If you are balancing your checkbook and you cannot remember why you wrote a particular check, your bank’s website can probably provide you with an image of that check. You can not only receive a monthly summary of your credit card expenditures, but you can look at the activity of that card between statements, which means you can catch fraud relatively quickly.
Because of the fierce competition between internet merchants and the possibility of very simple comparison shopping, the internet makes it easy to save money on necessary purchases. You don’t have to drive to three different brick and mortar stores to price television sets, only to find they do not carry the same models. You can get on a price comparison website and find the various prices of a particular model. Not only that, but you can often read reviews of actual customers about the item, which can help you to decide if you want to buy it.
Not only has the internet given us greater information and new ways of spending our money, but it has also opened the door for many people to have small businesses. In the pre-internet days, if you had an interest in creating a product for a niche market, you had to struggle to find customers. With the internet, you can create something for a very narrow market and still have a good chance at reaching almost everyone within that market.
Auction sites allow ordinary people to set up small businesses. “Crowdsourcing” sites pay people to accomplish tasks that are too complex for computers to do well. There are content sites that allow people to write and publish their ideas and to get paid based on the number of hits those articles receive. All of these resources allow people to diversify their income sources.
What will the future hold? More of the same and more new ways of handling finances that we cannot predict at the moment. After all, fifteen years ago were we able to predict our telephones would also be cameras?
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