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Posted
Aug 11 2008, 01:27 PM
by
Karen Datko
Rating:
Guess what country this paragraph from a New York Times story describes: Outstanding card debt here ballooned to nearly $18 billion last year, six times the level five years earlier. Default rates spiked and consumer groups protested sky-high interest charges. It's Turkey, where less than a generation ago consumer debt was almost unheard of and came with a heavy burden of shame.
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Posted
Jul 31 2008, 09:59 AM
by
Karen Datko
Rating:
If you're paying big bucks to credit-repair companies to piggyback on other people's good credit and artificially increase your score, the credit-score police will no longer be fooled.
So says Fair Isaac Corp., the company that devised the widely used FICO credit score. Fair Isaac has figured out a way to detect when people are abusing the privilege of authorized-user status on other people's credit cards. "Fortunately, we were able to come up with technology that makes it much harder to game the system," Fair Isaac chief operations officer Mike Campbell told CreditCards.com.
This is good news for consumers.
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Posted
Jul 11 2008, 03:45 PM
by
Karen Datko
Rating:
If you thought credit card companies offer rewards and cash back because they want to give you things, think again. Several bloggers were intrigued by a study in the July issue of Consumer Reports about how rewards programs work -- in favor of the companies. "Consumer Reports found that people who have rewards cards often end up spending more money than those with a regular card, and on top of that, they don't always reap the benefits of having the card," wrote Peter at Bible Money Matters.
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Posted
May 19 2008, 04:35 PM
by
Karen Datko
Just how bad is foreclosure? As the "Silicon Valley Blogger" points out, pretty awful. But it might just be the end to a financial nightmare that's keeping you up at night. If faced with the prospect of foreclosure, the important thing is that you understand the consequences -- and there will be some -- of this huge financial step.
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Posted
May 19 2008, 02:19 PM
by
Karen Datko
You don't need to have a crazy interest-only or adjustable-rate mortgage to feel the pain of the housing slump. A reader who posted a question at Free Money Finance wisely put 20% down and got a fixed-rate mortgage in Las Vegas when that housing market was sizzling hot. Now it's not, and he's upside down -- he owes more on the house than it's worth because of dropping values. His problem is that he wants to move.
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Posted
May 03 2008, 05:47 PM
by
Karen Datko
Rating:
Former baseball star Jose Canseco is walking away from his 7,300-square-foot mansion in a Los Angeles suburb. But did you know he's only the latest celebrity who has faced foreclosure? In fact, the Los Angeles Times blog L.A. Land has an occasional feature called "Celebrity Foreclosures," and so far has written about such notables as Canseco and Marion Jones. The most recent installment includes suggested headlines about Canseco like "Jose walks" and "Canseco took a walk, but was called out at home."
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Posted
Apr 09 2008, 12:55 PM
by
Karen Datko
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Seb at Pinching Copper apparently said aloud what other people have been thinking when he wrote "There are no victims in the housing bust." He's tired of all the media stories about "innocent" people who suddenly find out that they can no longer afford their homes. "So who do you blame in all this?" Seb wrote. "The bank that approved the loan? The TV show that pumped homeownership? The Realtor who sold the house? In the end, the only person to blame is the one who signed the mortgage document. "The media can portray these people as victims, but the sad truth is that the vast majority of people who are being foreclosed upon could never afford a home to begin worth," Seb said.
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Posted
Apr 03 2008, 07:46 PM
by
Karen Datko
Rating:
Is your windshield frosted over in the morning? Whip out that credit card and scrape it off. That's right. They're also good for removing the crustaceans that grow on the inside of your saltwater aquarium. "Not sure if you're getting a good shave?" writes Gibble at Gather Little by Little. "Run the edge of a credit card over your beard. The noise will tell you how well you shaved." Gibble's not totally kidding. He doesn't like credit cards. But he still gets those fake cards that come in the mail with credit card applications and wanted to figure out uses for them rather than throwing them away. You can also apply his tricks to old cards that you've retired from service. He explains: "I've been burned, and I've seen and read about far too many people's lives turned upside-down through the use of credit cards. Recently though, I've been trying to focus on being more environmentally conscientious."
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Posted
Mar 18 2008, 08:37 AM
by
Karen Datko
Rating:
Ready for a dose of outrage? Credit Slips and others report that several ordinary citizens scheduled to testify at a congressional hearing on credit card companies' bad practices were told they had to first sign a waiver allowing the companies to publicly disclose every bit of financial information they had on these folks wherever or whenever the companies pleased. "The Republicans and Democrats had worked out a deal 'to be fair to the credit card lenders,'" wrote Elizabeth Warren, a Harvard law professor and one of three Credit Slips bloggers who testified before a House Financial Services subcommittee last week. "These people couldn't say anything unless they were willing to let the credit card companies strip them naked in public." Four of the five citizen witnesses declined to sign and weren't allowed to testify. (To read the prepared remarks of one of those witnesses in a .pdf file, click here.)
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Posted
Mar 06 2008, 08:32 AM
by
Karen Datko
Rating:
Here are some stunning facts: The total value of homes owned in the U.S. has increased from $834 billion to $5.1 trillion, in inflation-adjusted dollars, since 1952. In the same time, home equity -- the portion people have paid off -- has increased from $672 billion to more than $2.5 trillion. That sounds like great news. But it also means the average equity people have in their homes dropped from 80% of the home's value in those Howdy Doody days to a record low of 50.4%. This information comes from Michael Rizzo, senior economist at the American Institute for Economic Research. "In short, the value of homes has increased greatly since 1952, but mortgage debt has increased even more," Rizzo writes at the institute's Web site.
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