Linda Stern

It's not the long airport lines or even those lonely hotel rooms that defeat frequent business travelers. It's filling out those dreaded expense reports when they get back to the office.

For a while, mobile social software (MoSoSo) has automated the idea of affinity groups. But now businesses are noticing. Embraced early by Dodgeball.com as a way for cell-phone-toting singles to find each other, MoSoSo marries mobile-communications technology with a giant database.

Turning on the heat for the first time in the fall is no fun. It signifies the cold dark days to come, and there's that unpleasant smell of money burning.

Credit-card issuers hoping to lure holiday shoppers are rolling out a new round of deals. Choose carefully, since adding cards can hurt your credit rating.

Think "The Apprentice" meets "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy." Small-business owners now have their own reality makeover show, airing Saturday nights on the Learning Channel (TLC)--when else does the boss have time to watch TV? "Taking Care of Business" has its own team of entrepreneurial experts who will try to rescue a different small business every week.

It's like accounting software with training wheels. Intuit, publisher of Quicken and Turbotax, has just released a dumbed-down version of its business-bookkeeping software, Quickbooks, for the 9 million American small-business owners who are still using pencils and shoeboxes.

Maybe the ATM industry got a little ahead of itself. For about a decade banks have been throwing money at new machines that could do everything from sell stamps to talk to customers.

There are 75 shopping days until Christmas, but Don Hodges, who manages the Hodges Fund, is already loading up. He's picked up some shares of Costco, Wal-Mart, Neiman Marcus and Sharper Image, positioning his four-star fund for what he hopes will be the profitable season to come. "Interest builds in retail stocks in the fall," he says. "Everyone watches with bated breath to see which ones look like they are doing well."Should you, too?

It's open enrollment season for employee benefits. That means many workers have to lay out their 2005 plans now and decide which health insurance to buy and how much money to set aside in flexible-spending or health-care savings accounts.

IBM retirees will get their cash, but what's it to you? It's too soon to tell. Last week IBM agreed to pay $300 million to settle old pension claims, and agreed to pay $1.4 billion more if a recent ruling, which struck down its "cash balance" pension plan, holds.Older IBMers said they were treated unfairly by the cash-balance plan, which tends to favor younger workers and job switchers.

It's a good time to digitize your finances. The two leading personal- finance software programs, Quicken and Microsoft Money, are out with new, souped- up versions just in time for year-end number crunching.

Coming soon to a strip mall near your office: Enterprise Rent-a-Car. Last year the privately held firm opened a branch a day, topped the list of college-graduate recruiters and made serious inroads into the corporate market. "What they did was take a basic business and Starbuck-ize it," says Neil Abrams, a Purchase, N.Y., rental-car consultant. "They put one on every corner." With 12,000 new employees in two years, and branches within 15 minutes of 90 percent of the U.S. population, the company...

Online travel agents are wooing corporate managers with improvements that go way beyond what the typical vacation-planning consumers see on the Web. That's because travel management has become big business, as companies realize they waste too many resources letting their executive road warriors make their own reservations.

Money-market funds are coming to life after the Federal Reserve's repeated rate hikes. Average annual yields crossed the 1 percent mark last week and, for the first time since 2002, beat the average money-market rate paid by the banks, according to Peter Crane of iMoneynet.com.

The government is getting behind Wi-Fi for automobiles--and not because it wants to make sure you can IM your friends while zipping along the freeway. The Federal Communications Commission and the Department of Transportation are supporting new technology that will allow cars and roadside devices to talk to each other in the interest of safety and traffic management.

Ah, the good old days, when first class really meant something: shrimp cocktail, china and crystal--and an extra $1,000 or more tacked on to the price of your ticket.

It's a catch-22: you need a credit history to get a credit score, and you need a credit score to borrow money and build that history. Now Fair Isaac Corporation, the company that invented credit scoring, will give FICO grades to people without a credit history by looking at how responsibly they pay their bills and handle their bank accounts.

Nessa Feddis, a lawyer for the American Bankers Association, just got rid of all her canceled checks. Twenty years of grocery, mortgage, car-repair payments...

Giant lecture halls can be easier to navigate than those first credit-card bills. Some tips for new students:^ CampusEdge is a new checking account from Bank of America (bankof america.com) that comes with a Stuff Happens card that kids can use once to get an overdraft fee waived.^ MBNA offers a MasterCard through www.collegeparents.com that allows parents to set credit limits and peruse the charges, but lets students learn by paying the bills.^ Find the best rates and fees on student cards at...

Oh, sure, watching your house go up in value is fun--until you get your property-tax bill. Municipalities, feeling pinched, are pumping up their assessments and their rates.

BY LINDA STERN Rich Phillips has a wife, three kids and a need for health insurance that won't bust his budget. When the Austin, Texas, consultant left a salaried job last fall to start his own company, Phillips, 34, was getting quotes of about $1,000 a month to replace the policy offered by his former employer.

Are you so confident about John Kerry or George W. Bush in 2004 that you're willing to put your money where your vote is? The University of Iowa is running a real-money futures market on the presidential race at www.biz.uiowa.edu/iem.

Rich kids have always had an easier route to college. But here's the news: the enrollment gap between the haves and the have-nots is getting worse, and leaders at the elite schools are taking notice. "We're losing one of every four really smart low-income kids," says Williams College president Morton Owen Schapiro, who has studied this issue for more than a decade.In 10 years, average college costs have stayed a fairly constant 6 percent of wealthy-family income, and climbed from 17 percent to...

You nailed your SAT--how hard can it be to balance your checkbook and manage a credit card? You'd be surprised. Learning how to budget while you're trying to find your classrooms and pay for books and football tickets out of that pittance you saved from your summer job is harder than it looks.

If you thought the application process was painful, you don't know pain. (Cue scary music.) That's probably the tuition bill in the mailbox right now. Rising college costs have been lamented for a generation, but this year we really mean it.

Guess who's offering low-rate loans? The Internal Revenue Service, though that's not how the agency would describe it. The IRS just lowered the interest rate it charges for underpayment of taxes from 5 percent to 4 percent through Sept. 1.

All that phone-company competition was nice while it lasted, but now long-distance rates are going up. Sprint Sense customers will see a new $3.95-a-month fee on their bill next month, while MCI is hiking several of its plans. Don't stop talking to the family, but do think about cutting your calling costs:

Alan Greenspan made his move last week; now it's your turn. Oh, sure, you could just sit back and watch the rates rise on your home-equity line and your credit cards while your 401(k) slides sideways.

Bounced a few checks lately? The Federal Reserve recently OK'd controversial and expensive "bounce-protection plans" for low-income customers who don't qualify for traditional overdraft credit lines.

If you thought building a retirement nest egg was tough, wait until it's time to crack it open. The calculus involved in making the money last could give a Mensa member a headache. But Fidelity's new Retirement Income Advantage program lets clients plan safe, tax-efficient withdrawals through a financial adviser or with software at fidelity.com/retire. You'll be able to put your transfers on autopilot, generating paychecks designed to last forever. Best of all, until 2005 the planning is free.