Allianz Life released their second study on women and money today.

While some of the Women Money and Power Phase II study findings are interesting, I can’t help but wonder: Would men have answered much differently?

For example women who were surveyed answered the following regarding financial information:

Information is overwhelming/too much/hard to sort through	44 percent
Information is complicated or hard to understand	36 percent
Materials are really boring and dry	32 percent
Don’t understand terminology/materials seem foreign	26 percent

I would not be the least bit surprised to learn that many guys feel the same way. It’s not a female thing to think that much of the terminology and materials that insurance companies utilize is hard for even finance majors to digest.

Here’s another example

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I received an e-mail today from Turbo Tax that essentially said the early bird doesn’t get the worm– he gets to revise his tax return.

Dear Valued Customer,

At TurboTax we are committed to helping you receive every deduction and credit to which you are entitled.

We are sending you this notice because at the time you prepared your Minnesota State return, your TurboTax product may not have included functionality designed to help you maximize your K-12 education deductions and credits.

If you did not incur education expenses for your children in tax year 2007, please disregard this notice. This ONLY affects you if you:

1)	Had children who attended Kindergarten through High School (grades K-12) and lived with you more than six months during 2007 AND
2)	Paid education expenses for these children in 2007 AND
3)	Did not receive a credit (Form M1, line 30) or a deduction (Form M1, line 7) on your 2007 Minnesota state return.

To find out if you already received a credit or deduction, print and/or review Form M1 of your 2007 Minnesota state return. If there is an amount on line 7 or line 30, you received your education tax deduction and/or credit and you can disregard this notice.

However, if you think you may qualify for an education credit and/or education deductions you did not receive, TurboTax can help you get the deductions and credits to which you are entitled.

Get started with step-by-step instructions to amend your return.

Sincerely,

Bob Meighan

Vice President, TurboTax

P.S. TurboTax Online for Tax Year 2007 is ONLY available until October 15, 2008. You must file your TurboTax Online amended return on or before this date. To learn more about this deduction and credit, click here. If you do not find the answers you are looking for, or if you still have questions, call 888-777-4160.

It’s easy to get into a rut. I’m in one lately where I make the same boring loop from money site to money site in search of the latest on the stock market and consumer finance.

The Wall Street Journal to Yahoo Finance to MSN Money and back again with a stop once a week or so for a peek at Filife.com, Pfblogs.org and The Consumerist.

Sigh. 

What’s your personal finance information diet? Do you have a blog you read regularly or a writer you always check out? If you do, you know what to do.

For the past year or so, our financial life has been humming along without a budget. We’ve been automatically saving for retirement, emergencies, and big ticket expenses. We pay our fixed expenses and then treat ourselves now and then to dinner out, a movie, or a trip to a pool.

But I started noticing in recent weeks that the $1,000 or so reserve in our checking account I try to keep to avoid any chance of an overdraft was shrinking. By the time we paid our credit card bill and our money was whisked into savings, we’d have $500 or $600 in reserve.

This pay period, we’ll have just $195 left over after fixed expenses and savings. The culprits? Well, food and gas, of course. Our gas bill is up, even though we don’t drive much or very far. Our food bill is up about $100.

But it’s not just rising prices. I admit that we’ve been having a little too much pricey fun lately. Our day care bill also just increased by about $90 per month. Our salaries, on the other hand, have not.

In a situation like this there are only two things to do: Cut savings or cut expenses. We could try to earn more income, but that would require working more. That for our young family would be an option of last resort.

Naturally, cutting expenses will be the first avenue I explore. I could spend time with Mint.com or Quicken or another software program, tracking my spending the 21st century way.

But instead, I’ve opted for a folded up piece of paper in my purse that I’ll use to document how much I spend on gum, fizzy water, shoes, or roast beef sandwiches.

I’ll be honest though. I don’t want to cut expenses. We’ve just agreed to cancel cable now that Top Chef is over. But I’m comfortable with how much we spend and don’t think we are extravagant.

So in the next couple of months I’m also going to take a look at savings. Is it possible that we are saving too much? Or with an uncertain job market and the economy, am I totally nuts to even consider putting less away?

Did I really just successfully book a non-stop frequent flier ticket for 25,000 on Northwest? In August. Flying back to Minneapolis the weekend of the RNC?

Somebody pinch me. In recent years, I’ve had zero success booking frequent flier tickets. It’s been several years since I could afford one because we aren’t frequent fliers and I rarely could find a ticket for as little as 25,000 miles.

Most of the time, I’d log on and find that a ticket would cost me 50,000 or more.

I still have a no-fee Worldperks Visa card (but I only earn 1 mile for every $2 spent). But I never use it. Getting gift cards that I know I can use is a much better perk in my book.

But today, I happened to log on and see if there was a ticket to Hartford, CT in August so my husband could fly to the wedding of a childhood friend. The wedding is a must attend and I’ve nervously watched the price tag rise in the past couple of months climb from around $380 to a whopping $785 today.

So I was amazed to find a Worldperks ticket for him to use. I’d say 25,000 miles for a $785 ticket is a great value.

My colleague Liz Fedor, who covers airlines, wrote a story last week about frequent flier miles. And research she included in the story shows that while it’s not always easy to find a flight, there are some out there.

Jay Sorensen, who runs Wisconsin-based IdeaWorks, had heard plenty of anecdotes from people who couldn’t book the trips they wanted using miles. So his company made 5,000 booking queries to assess the seat availability for reward tickets on eight large airlines.

He found that a family of four traveling in the summer could book tickets to key markets more than 46 percent of the time. A couple flying outside the summer season could book reward tickets on American, Alaska, United and Southwest more than 96 percent of the time.

Matt may have to buy his own pop, pay for extra bags and check himself in, but at least he’ll be on that plane.