I want answers!

For everybody that replied in some way: thank you for the feedback on this effort. There's a lot of good questions and a lot to talk about, but for the antsy or impatient among you, I am assembling a quick cheat sheet. This is like skipping to the end of the book without reading what happened in the middle: it could be totally useless, or could be all you were really interested in.

This is a list that will track some of the best places to take your financial services business. I'll update this with input from you as I hear it. If you don't have the familiarity or interest to research brokerages/banks/credit cards, this is a cheat sheet pointing to some of the best (lowest cost, highest return) places. There are plenty of other cheat sheets easily searchable if you don't like this one.

Regular Investing:
Stocks and ETFs:
I like this one because it doesn't charge you a fee to buy a stock or stock index. You just pay for the stock (or ETF). If you're looking for a place to buy stock/ETF's, you'll see that most of them (scottrade, etrade, sharebuilder, etc.) will charge you transaction fees ... usually something like $5-10 per trade sometimes plus a small % of the trade. If you're 20-something and buying $100 or so at a time, you've just lost about 10% of your investment (side note: 10% is the "average" return of the stock market per year...which is not to say that you should expect it each year). Then, when you go to sell it, you've lost another $10 and you're starting $20 in the negative.

Zecco: Once you have $2,500 to invest, you get free trades. My corporate whoring disclosure: if you click on this link, and fund with that amount, I get a $50 referral fee (so Delfina is on me that night) http://friends.zecco.com/r/88b2a344b349102b8555

Regular Investing and Retirement Investing:
I like these for mutual funds. They provide a variety of fund types, many index funds, so generally can charge low management fees for performance that matches the market. If you know more about particular funds that you think will do well, it might be worth paying more for them.. but I still don't know/have time to determine whether a fund is well managed or not. So, instead of spending a bunch of time researching to make an educated gamble on one or another, I am lazy and choose indexes, which by definition guarantee a return that is average.

www.vanguard.com
www.fidelity.com

High Yield Savings/Checking Accounts:
No monthly fees, no minimum balances. You're loaning banks money, you shouldn't be paying for the privilege of giving them a loan:

www.wamu.com - 3.75% APY in an online savings account only when linked to an also free checking account
www.everbank.com - 2.25% APY in a checking account. While your money is parked waiting for the landlord to cash your check, you're earning money. This account reimburses you for some amount of out of network ATM fees which is also nice. I believe www.ingdirect.com has the same thing but lower APY (pays you less money) ... if you sign up for this one, there's a $25 referral bonus if you can find a friend that already has it to refer you.

Credit Cards:
www.chase.com - The 'chase real rewards' card has something between 1-3% cash back on each purchase. This is good if you don't carry a balance. If you do, get one with the lowest interest rate available (then send the name of it to me so I can post it)
american express has a similar one- the blue card. I hate american express on behalf of retailers everywhere. They charge retailers 3x as much to take their cards, but give you the same amount back and don't do anything else special that I know of.

Vocabulary:
If somebody says something...like ETF, option, annuity.. that you don't understand (and you want/need to understand it), a good common sense, quick definition can usually be found @ www.investopedia.com.