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• How to max out credit card rewards

  Posted Jul 29 2008, 04:28 AM by Karen Datko
  Filed under: Debt, Banking, Credit, Blueprint for Financial Prosperity

  This post comes from partner blog Blueprint for Financial Prosperity.

  With the prices of food and gas where they are, everyone's looking for an edge. For more and more people, myself included, that edge is in maximizing what you can get out of credit card cash-back reward programs.

  Credit card companies charge vendors a hefty percentage to process credit card transactions (AMEX and Discover charge the most; that's why they often have the best cash-back programs), so doesn't it make sense that they pass along some of that to you? Of course it does.

  Here are eight tips I use to ensure I get the most cash back from credit cards:   Read More...

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• How online bill paying adds months to your life

  Posted Apr 29 2008, 05:33 AM by Karen Datko
  Filed under: Banking, Spending, Credit, Blueprint for Financial Prosperity

  This post comes from partner blog Blueprint for Financial Prosperity.

  Back in the days of personal checks and monthly bills, "doing the bills" was an arduous task that took hours and hours. Back in the days of check registers and balancing a checkbook, doing the bills was like accounting lite.

  With the advent of online checking and electronic bill-payment systems, there isn't any logical reason why you should be spending an hour or two each month dealing with bills. By setting up your bill-payment details and conducting your transactions entirely online, you can add months to your life.   Read More...

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• Devil's advocate: Cancel unused credit cards

  Posted Feb 26 2008, 08:13 AM by Karen Datko
  Filed under: Banking, Credit, Blueprint for Financial Prosperity

  This devil's advocate post comes from partner blog Blueprint for Financial Prosperity.

  It's widely believed that your credit score can be improved if you keep your unused credit cards, rather than cancel them. By keeping those cards, you are increasing the average age of your lines of credit, increasing the total amount of credit, and decreasing your credit utilization -- all good things when it comes to computing your score.

  So why do I always advocate canceling unused cards? I believe it is the safest thing for you to do and is better than keeping unused cards for the credit-score benefit.

  Security breaches. GE Money, a branch of General Electric Capital Corp. that manages the in-store credit card programs of many retailers, recently reported that a backup tape put into storage at Iron Mountain Inc. had gone missing.

  What was on it? It contained personal information on about 650,000 people, including the Social Security numbers of about 150,000 people.   Read More...

  Discuss ( 1 comments) 41,935 Views Digg this | Email this | Link to this