The Concept
The Structure
Procedural Features
Managing Website Passwords
Returning from the Internet
Printing the Material
How To Speed Up Surfing the Internet 

Financial Strategies Online is more than just a Website. It is an Information Technology System containing an immense database of financial information (almost 3,000 pages) that will be of continual benefit to you.

We suggest putting the URL address that you use for accessing this site into your Bookmark or Favorite Programs list so you will be able to access it easily. 

One of the unique aspects of Financial Strategies Online is that it provides completely unbiased and objective information. Unlike virtually all financial Websites, it has nothing to sell and carries no advertising. It is intended to benefit only you — allowing you to take advantage of financial opportunities and better handle your financial problems. 

The site is specifically designed to be crisp and clean, not only to make the material easier to follow (a lot of Web information is graphically too complex for easy reading) but also to have the material "load" as quickly as possible. This minimizes the long waits that viewers of many sites have to endure. The Financial Strategies Online site was tested by NetMechanic's robot to check the download time for our entire site, browser compatibility, broken hyperlinks & HTML errors. As a result of these tests, scored an impressive four-star rating.

Of course, there are many reasons why material loads slowly (slow modem, heavy traffic, poor service provider, etc.) Yet there are many ways to speed up your surfing. For tips on how to accomplish this, see How To Speed Up Surfing the Internet.

The procedures for finding advice and information in Financial Strategies Online are intended to be intuitive and easy to follow — especially considering the range and amount of information in the database. Therefore, reference to this User's Guide may not be necessary. Nonetheless, it is available for those who prefer an in-depth explanation of the site, its structure and benefits.

There are six major sections in Financial Strategies Online, all readily accessed from the navigation bar which appears throughout the site.  

After selecting one of the four major Sections — Life Events, Business Strategies, Tax Strategies or Investment Strategies — you will be offered a choice of three types of information:

A. Financial Guides
B. Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
C. Planning Aids

A. Financial Guides

Each Section contains a number of Financial Guides (generally ranging from 4–16 pages in length), which provides you with a thorough analysis of a particular topic. Most Financial Guides contain the following features:

B. Frequently Asked Questions

Each Section also contains a list of Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) that provide quick answers to common questions. Each FAQ section is prefaced with a Table of Contents for each FAQ regarding a particular section. You simply need to click on the FAQ you are interested in, and you will be automatically taken to the answer. You can return to the Table Of Contents menu by clicking on the link titled "Table Of Contents."

C.  Planning Aids

Many Life Event menus and many Financial Guides contain links to financial planning aids such as:

• Financial Calculators (almost 100 in all) to help you choose, usually with advice from your financial advisor, among different financial alternatives applicable to the particular topic discussed in the Guide.
  

  Note: These financial calculators are provided primarily to focus your thinking and encourage you to address your particular financial situation. They are not applicable to all clients or all situations. It must be stressed that they should be used in conjunction with professional advice.

  
  
• External Sites that lead you to helpful information on the Internet.
  

  Note: Although virtually all our links are to non-commercial sites (such as those hosted by the government, universities and non-profit organizations), occasionally, we will provide a link to a site that contains advertising (usually a minimum amount). This is done for the simple reason that the information is very helpful but is not otherwise available. We receive no compensation for providing the link to a site that contains advertising.

  
  
• Other Financial Planning Aids that are relevant to the particular Life Event.
  

  Note: If you link to a Calculator or to an External Site, you are leaving the Financial Strategies Online database and going onto the Internet. To see the various ways you can quickly return to this site, see Returning from the Internet.

Monthly Newsletter

In addition to the content contained in the above four Sections, Financial Strategies Online offers a monthly Newsletter, the electronic version of a hard-copy newsletter.

Client Portal

This interactive page features a collection of useful modules targeted to your personal and business needs. It contains current headlines, helpful links and more.

In addition to the above content, Financial Strategies Online contains three procedural features as shown in the following diagram:

Search

You can use our search engines to search for specific information in Financial Strategies Online, rather than going through the above avenues to our database information. You can search by key words or phrases. (It makes no difference whether you use either lower or upper case letters). Please do not exceed three words. This search function (Boolean) allows use of the words and, or, and not and parentheses to help you zero in more precisely on your targeted topic:

• By using the word "and" in conjunction with the key words (e.g., education and benefits), you will bring up all topics that contain both of those words.
• By using the word "or" in conjunction with the key words (e.g., pension or retirement), you will bring up all topics that contain either of those words.
• By using the word "not" in conjunction with the key words (e.g., corporation but not tax), you will bring up all topics that contain the first word but not the second, that is, the search will exclude a document if it contains both corporation and tax.
• By using parentheses.

The Search function will bring you to all Financial Guides, FAQs, Newsletter items, Reference Library and Planning Aids — as defined by your search parameters. Then, by clicking on any of these items, it will bring you directly to that item.

The Search results are scored to show the quality of the match, that is, they show the number of times the Search terms occur in each document in our database. Generally, the more times the terms appear in a document, the more relevant the document is to your needs.

In addition, the Search results displays a score value, indicating the quality of the match.

You can also search outside our database on the Internet by using the External Search function, which allows you to connect to a number of Internet search engines. For an overview of these search engines, see All About Search Engines.

User's Guide

Any time you are navigating our site and want to review this Users' Guide, just click on the Users' Guide button in the top banner of all FSO pages.

Feedback

The Feedback feature allows your clients to send an email to your firm.

Privacy gurus tell us to keep different usernames and passwords for different sites and services, and to vary all of them periodically. But remembering all those passwords and IDs are nearly impossible. Here are several tricks for managing all your online personae.

Store Your Alter Egos With Your Bookmarks. 

• Netscape Navigator Bookmarks: Click Bookmarks | Edit Bookmarks, right-click the bookmark that you want to edit, and then select Bookmark Properties. Click inside the Location field, and press the <End> key to get to the end of the address. If the address appears as a "straight" address (that is, it ends with .com, .edu, .org, .html, or another common suffix), type a question mark followed by any information that will remind you of your "identity." The question mark tells the browser to ignore anything from that point on, but the information will display on the address bar whenever you go to that site. So if your username is Bob and your password is CPA, that line will be: http://www.yourfirm.com?Bob CPA. 

• Internet Explorer Favorites: Select Favorites | Organize Favorites, right-click the shortcut you wish to edit, select Properties, click inside the URL box, and press <End> to get to the end of the address. If the address appears as a "straight" address (that is, it ends with .com, .edu, .org, .html, or another common suffix), type a question mark followed by any information that will remind you of your "identity." The question mark tells the browser to ignore anything from that point on, but the information will display on the address bar whenever you go to that site. So if your username is Bob and your password is CPA, that line will be: http://www.yourfirm.com?Bob CPA. 

If you link to a Calculator or to an External Site, you are leaving Financial Strategies Online and going into the Internet. You can return to our site in one of several ways:

• If you have not accessed too many screens after leaving our site: You can use the Back button in your browser to return. It should not require too many clicks to get back to our site.
  
• If you have accessed many screens after leaving our site and want to return quickly: You can insert our Web address in the title bar of your browser, either by retyping our address or by using the dropdown menu to bring up previous Internet addresses and clicking on ours (if active in that menu). You can also use the Favorite Places or Bookmark function in your browser if we are included in that menu. (If we are not, you may want to include our site to make it easier to get back to it in the future.)

Printing information from a Web page: When you print a Web page, you can print the page as you see it on the screen, or you can print selected parts of it, such as a frame. In addition, you can specify that you want to print additional information in the headers and footers, such as the window title, page address, date, time, and page numbers.

More important than which Internet browser you use — is getting the latest version.  Most people use Microsoft's Internet Explorer or Netscape's Navigator. To get the best performance from the browser you choose, visit the company's Website— www.microsoft.com or www.netscape.com — every other month to see whether a new version is available. Downloading is free — and now quite easy. For fastest downloading and browsing, use a 56K modem. Some modem prices have even dropped below $100.

Netscape Navigator 4.x (and later) Tips

• Saving your eyes some strain. Look under the View menu and use the controls to increase or decrease font size.
  
• Turning things off for faster downloads. The biggest drag about using the World Wide Web is waiting for pages to load. The wait is particularly pronounced on slow connections (28.8 bps or less). One way to minimize the loading time for web pages is to tell your browser not to automatically load images. If you're in a rush, turning off images speed things up a bit. Under the Edit menu, select Preferences. The Preferences dialog box appears. Click advanced. Uncheck Automatically Load Images, and click OK. Images now only load if you select Show Image under the view menu. Reverse this process to make images load automatically.
  
• Control your cache.  If you return to the same Websites often, it makes sense to have a big disk cache: 5MB or more. A big cache will make those frequently visited pages load much more quickly, as your browser doesn't have to download all the images from the Web each time. However, if you constantly visit new Web pages, your cache doesn't do much but soak up disk space. You can trim it down by selecting Edit/Preferences from the main menu. Next, click the plus sign next to the Advanced category, then click the Cache category that appears. Enter a new disk cache size.

To avoid having to reload a cached document, Navigator stores retrieved Web pages in memory caches and disk caches and checks each newly requested document against both. This approach can save time if Navigator finds a document, but it can also waste time if the program checks the caches too often. To avoid this delay, select Edit/Preferences from the main menu. Next, click the plus sign (the triangle on Macs) next to the Advanced category, and then click the Cache category that appears. Under "Document in cache is compared to document on network," check either the Once Per Session or the Never option.

• Watch your cookies. These are bits of code that a Website leaves on your system to track all kinds of things. For instance, you can go to a shopping site, select some items to buy, leave the site, and come back later, only to find that your "shopping cart" still contains the items. How did it know to do that? With a cookie.

  But while cookies can be extremely useful, privacy-conscious Web surfers may want a warning when a site tries to give them one. To ensure that Navigator will provide such a warning, select Edit/Preferences from the main menu, then click the Advanced category. In the Cookies area, check the "Warn me before accepting a cookie" box. If you don't want to accept any cookies at all, select Disable Cookies.

   

• Browse offline. The slowest thing about browsing the Web is the wire itself. IE 4.x and later lets you work offline and browse through the cache on your hard drive. Simply select File/Work Offline from the IE main menu. Your online connection disconnects, and you're able to read files directly from your hard drive. If a page isn't stored in your cache, you see a small "not" sign next to the cursor. If you click a link that connects to a page you don't have on your drive, you get the options of either going online to retrieve the page or remaining offline. The Work Offline feature is designed to function best in conjunction with subscriptions.
  
• Saving your eyes some strain. The toolbar features a button that allows you to control font size. The button has an A on it with an up arrow and a down arrow next to it. Click the up arrow to increase font size, and click the down arrow to decrease.
  
• Surf Lean. Select View | Internet Options | Advanced and, under Multimedia, uncheck Play Animations, Play Videos and Play sounds, as desired and then click Apply.
  
• Turning things off for faster downloads. The biggest drag about using the World Wide Web is waiting for pages to load. The wait is particularly pronounced on slow connections (28.8 bps or less). One way to minimize the loading time for web pages is to tell your browser not to automatically load images. If you're in a rush, turning off images speed things up a bit. Choose View and then Internet Options. Click the Advanced Tab. Scroll down until you see the Multimedia section. Uncheck Show Pictures, then click Apply. Reverse this process to make images load automatically.
  
• Turn off the Active Desktop. The ability to add HTML pages, stock tickers, and other Web gobbledygook to your desktop may seem cool at first, but it does chew up processor power. To disable the Active Desktop whenever you're performing processor-intensive tasks, simply right-click anywhere on the desktop, and select Active Desktop/View as Web Page from the pop-up menus. You can repeat the process to turn it back on later.
  

You may not like to ask for directions when you're driving, but you need to be smart enough to ask for help when navigating the Internet. That's where search engines come in. They crawl the Web all day long, finding and indexing pages, then show you what they've found when you type in a string of keywords. Other sites guide you around the Web, too. Directories, or portals, such as Yahoo and Snap.com provide searches on popular engines, employ human editors to categorize Web sites, and offer extras such as free email. And metasearchers send your query to multiple search engines at the same time.

If one engine is good, then a dozen should be better. That's the theory behind metasearch and megasearch sites. Metasearch pages let you build a single search and then apply that query to multiple sites simultaneously. Megasearchers also store several engines under one roof, but that's strictly a convenience: you conduct searches one engine at a time.

SavvySearch. You select from scores of engines or other sites to search--from Direct Hit and Google to HotBot and AltaVista--and watch as it integrates the results.

Ask Jeeves lets you enter natural-language queries. It's super for search rookies, and Ask Jeeves for Kids is one of the best places to send pint-sized fact finders.

Mamma searches seven sites simultaneously. It does a nice job of combining the results and reordering them using its own relevancy ratings.

MetaCrawler is our No. 2 pick for metasearchers. It collates pages found from a slew of sites, plus offers the winning MiniCrawler, which performs searches in a discreet window on the desktop.