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Recent Reviews
- How we pay with plastic will change Monday with new credit card rules
- Eliminating ‘He Said, She Said’ on Loan Modifications
- 10 Ways to Screw Over the Corporate Jackals Who’ve Been Screwing You
- The Unemployment Game Show: Are You *Really* Unemployed? – From Mint.com
- Credit card’s newest trick: 79.9 percent interest
- 42% of parents have paid a child’s debt
- More Homeowners Fall Behind on Mortgages
- Problem mortgages hit new high at 14 percent
- Google Tackles Mortgage Market With New Comparison Ads
- Latest bank fee is for paying off credit card on time every month
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How we pay with plastic will change Monday with new credit card rules
New consumer-friendly rules taking effect Monday will mean colossal changes for the 180 million people nationwide who have credit cards — and even millions who don’t.
If you pay with plastic:
- No longer will banks arbitrarily be able to change the interest rate on your balance.
- No longer can they confuse you by changing the date your monthly payment is due.
- No longer can they cut your credit limit, allow you to go over it, then charge a penalty.
And the list goes on.
Read more at: Cleveland Ohio Business News
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{Photography by Jason Rogers}
Eliminating ‘He Said, She Said’ on Loan Modifications
WHEN it comes to home mortgage modifications, everyone seems to have a complaint.
Borrowers accuse mortgage servicers, which process the paperwork, of often losing important documents like pay stubs and bank statements. Servicers assert that the borrowers fail to submit certain papers and claim that they did, or submit the wrong ones.
Now, an industry group is rolling out an online portal that could eliminate these issues. Hope Now, a partnership of mortgage companies and nonprofit housing counselors, this month introduced “LoanPort,” which lets borrowers seeking a permanent mortgage modification upload digitized versions of their documents and track the progress of their application, with the help of a loan counselor.
“With this, there’s no ‘he said, she said’ element with lost documents,” said Faith Schwartz, the executive director of Hope Now, which is based in Washington.
But Howard Glaser, a principal of the Glaser Group, a consulting company in Washington, predicted that the initiative would be too small to have much impact on what he characterized as a broadly dysfunctional loan-modification effort.
“Marginal improvements are not going to have a significant impact on increasing loan modifications,” Mr. Glaser said.
Read more at: The New York Times
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{Photography by The Truth About}
10 Ways to Screw Over the Corporate Jackals Who’ve Been Screwing You
Tired of getting pushed around by faceless big business? Here are 10 ways to push back!
The New Year is nearly here, and so much has happened. Wait, what’s that? Nothing major at all has happened, you say? Oh right, we’ve been stuck in neutral since dumping the toxic trash of the Republican Bush administration and embracing Democratic promises of hope and change, neither of which have blossomed.
A year of our collective life has flown by and our global culture is still rife with schemers, screw jobs and sorry excuses for solutions. And we just sit back and take it, year after year. But no more. When you make that hefty list of New Year’s resolutions, drop some of these bombs. Then duck. You’ll get your change faster than you can say, “Teabag this!”
1. Mortgage underwater? Just walk away from it. Even academia says it’s OK. Move to the city and rent.
“Homeowners should be walking away in droves,” University of Arizona law school professor Brent T. White told the Los Angeles Times. “But they aren’t. And it’s not because the financial costs of foreclosure outweigh the benefits. One can have a good credit rating again — meaning above 660 — within two years after a foreclosure.”
In a scholarly paper called “Underwater and Not Walking Away: Shame, Fear and the Social Management of the Housing Crisis,” White tells cash-jacked homeowners that they can return the screw.
We’ve been championing that course for years, with reports on walkaways and trashouts, as well as violent homeowner blowback. Hell, we called the Great Recession before most did, and we’re still calling it another Great Depression in the making. So trust us. And if not us, then take it from the professor, who will soon be joined by a chorus of similarly credentialed whistleblowers as the financial crap truly hits the fan in the years to come. Go ahead, move back to the city and rent. You’ll end up there anyway when your suburb runs out of water and malls.
Read more at: AlterNet
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{Photography by Shoothead}
The Unemployment Game Show: Are You *Really* Unemployed? – From Mint.com
Credit card’s newest trick: 79.9 percent interest
It’s no mistake. This credit card’s interest rate is 79.9 percent.
The bloated APR is how First Premier Bank, a subprime credit card issuer, is skirting new regulations intended to curb abusive practices in the industry. It’s a strategy other subprime card issuers could start adopting to get around the new rules.
Typically, the First Premier card comes with a minimum of $256 in fees in the first year for a credit line of $250. Starting in February, however, a new law will cap such fees at 25 percent of a card’s credit line.
In a recent mailing for a preapproved card, First Premier lowers fees to just that limit — $75 in the first year for a credit line of $300. But the new law doesn’t set a cap on interest rates. Hence the 79.9 APR, up from the previous 9.9 percent.
Read more at: Finance.yahoo.com
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{Photography by Hans Gerwitz}
42% of parents have paid a child’s debt
Before bailing out offspring, ask yourself whether you’re really helping.
A new poll by CreditCards.com found that 42% of people with adult children have paid a debt for their children at some point. But should they?
The debts most commonly paid off were auto loans (40%) and medical debt (37%). But the survey also found that parents had paid utility debt (31%), credit cards (30%), student loans (29%) and mortgages (11%).
“It used to be that kids would be embarrassed to ask for help. Not anymore,” Michael McAuliffe, president of Family Credit Management, a Chicago nonprofit credit counseling agency, told CreditCards.com’s Connie Prater.
The current generation of parents has always provided more help to their children than their parents’ generation did, helping with everything from homework to science projects to college essays and beyond.
This trend, coupled with changes in the economy, has found many parents continuing to help their children financially long past college.
Read more at: MSN Money
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{Photography by Leonid Mamchenkov}
More Homeowners Fall Behind on Mortgages
About one in seven American households with mortgages is behind on payments or in foreclosure, according to new data from the Mortgage Bankers Association. That is up from about one in 10 a year ago.
The group reported Thursday that 14.4% of first-lien mortgages on one-to-four-family homes in the third quarter were 30 days or more overdue or in the foreclosure process. That is the highest rate since the MBA began reporting such data in 1972, and works out to about 7.5 million households at risk of losing homes. The percentage is up from 10% a year earlier and 7.3% two years ago.
Loan defaults have been rising swiftly for more than three years. At first, the problem largely reflected loose lending practices during the housing boom that allowed millions of people to buy homes they couldn’t afford. Now the problem is compounded by rising unemployment, which hit 10.2% in October, the highest since 1982.
Read more at: The Wall Street Journal
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{Photography by Sleepy Neko}
Problem mortgages hit new high at 14 percent
Data mean foreclosures may not peak until next year
More than 14 percent of borrowers were in trouble on their mortgage during the third quarter, a new record, according to an industry survey released Thursday, which also suggests that the foreclosure rate is likely not to peak until next year as unemployment rates continue to rise.
Unemployment remains a big driver of the problem, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association, which conducts the survey. Those with delinquent loans now include a growing portion of people traditionally considered creditworthy and people whose mortgages are insured by the Federal Housing Administration.
“The outlook is that delinquency rates and foreclosure rates will continue to worsen before they improve,” said Jay Brinkmann, the group’s chief economist.
About 9.6 percent of borrowers were delinquent on their mortgage during the third quarter, according to the survey, and another 4.5 percent more were somewhere in the foreclosure process. Overall, about 14 percent of mortgage loans or 7.4 million households were delinquent or in the foreclosure process during the quarter, according to the group.
Read more at: The Washington Post
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{Photography by The Truth About . . .}
Google Tackles Mortgage Market With New Comparison Ads
Google has just debuted
a new form of advertising called AdWords Comparison Ads — a special kind of ad that will prompt users to view a list of sponsored products in a structured format. To get started, Google is running the ads for queries related to the mortgage market, though it has plans to eventually expand beyond that. The ads are in a limited rollout for now, with only some users in some states seeing them.
Here’s how Google describes the new ad type:
AdWords uses a host of targeting and relevancy signals to determine the best ads for each query. However, sometimes a user’s query doesn’t provide enough information for us to confidently predict what they want. Take, for example, users who search for “mortgage.” Do they want a new home loan or a refinance? Do they want a fixed rate or an adjustable rate loan? Comparison Ads improves the ad experience on Google.com by letting users specify exactly what they are looking for and helping them quickly compare relevant offers side by side.
Users searching for “mortgage” on Google.com may see a promotion from Comparison Ads prompting them to select the type of loan they are looking for and to compare various rates.
If they click the promotion, users are taken to a page with more detailed sponsored results. They can choose directly from the offers listed on that page, or they can further refine their search by providing additional information like income and home value…
Once users find an offer that matches their specific needs, they can either call you directly or request a quote. If a user requests a quote, Google automatically anonymizes the user’s phone number and sends you a unique code that you can use to contact the user. You only pay if a user calls the phone number on your offer or fills out a form to request a quote.
Read more at: TechCrunch
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{Photography by Austin Evan}
Latest bank fee is for paying off credit card on time every month
You may believe that your exemplary behavior shields you from unexpected credit card fees. Sadly, that is no longer the case.
Starting next year, Bank of America will charge a small number of customers an annual fee, ranging from $29 to $99. The bank has characterized the fee as experimental. But card holders who have never carried a balance or paid late fees could be among those affected.
Citigroup, meanwhile, has started charging annual fees to card holders who don’t put more than a specific amount on their cards, typically $2,400 a year. Other banks are charging inactivity fees if customers don’t use their credit cards during a specific period of time. You heard that right: You could be spanked for staying out of debt.
Read more at: USA Today
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{Photography by Andres Rueda}
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