-
Select the Card for You
Select by Type of Card:- Gas Rebate Credit Cards
- Airline Credit Cards
- Balance Transfer Cards
- Business Credit Cards
- Cash Back Credit Cards
- Instant Approval Cards
- Low Interest Credit Cards
- Prepaid & Debit Cards
- Reward Credit Cards
- Student Credit Cards
- Select by Credit History
- Select by Bank
- Friends
-
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
Top Rated Offers
Plastic Flashback: A visual history of the credit card.
From Diner’s Club and BankAmericard to the latest – and maybe – greatest offerings, visual article at: TheBigMoney.com)
___________
{Photography by B Rosen}
Graduates with student loan debt work many years before their net earnings equal those of workers without a degree, according to a College Board study
For most people, taking on debt to pay for college or graduate school is a good long-term investment. College graduates on average earn 61% more than those with just a high school diploma over the course of a 40-year career, according to a 2007 analysis of census data by the College Board. In 2007 the average annual salary for a worker with a bachelor’s degree was $57,000, compared to $31,000 for a high school grad.
But in the short term, it’s hard for many younger workers to see the payoff as they struggle to make loan payments and gain a foothold in a difficult job market. Consider this: The average college graduate who borrows the full cost of tuition and fees at a public university will be 33 before accumulated net earnings catch up to counterparts who enter the workforce directly from high school—after factoring in tuition costs, interest, and earnings foregone during the years in school—according to the College Board study. Those who borrow more to attend a private college or graduate school take even longer to match high school grads in net earnings.
As tuition rises faster than inflation and wages, some suggest that the U.S. needs to rethink the way people pay for higher education. “Young people are entering adulthood, entering the workforce, with this huge burden on their shoulders, and as a society we need to ask, ‘Is this really how we should be educating people?’” says Edie Irons, a spokeswoman for the Project on Student Debt. “When young people are starting out in the hole, how are they going to afford to buy a house or go to grad school or start a business or start a family?”
___________
{Photography by B Rosen}
Is Your Home A Good Investment?
There’s the usual talk about what the latest Case-Shiller house price data mean for the next short term move in the real estate market. Has housing bottomed? If not, has the rate of decline slowed? And when will we see an upturn?
Human nature likes the short term. Which is why so little attention is paid to something that is probably more important, if less urgent: What the latest data show about the long-term of the real estate market.
And it’s startling.
We have just been through the biggest boom in real estate in American history. The subsequent bust surely hasn’t finished.
Yet look at the numbers. Since 1987, when the Case-Shiller index of 10 major cities begins, it’s risen from an index value of 63 to 151. Annual return: Just 4.1% a year. During that period, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, consumer prices rose by 3% a year. Net result: Home prices produced a real return of just 1.15% a year over inflation over that time.
Critics may point out that the analysis is unfair — after all, it starts counting near the peak of the 1980s housing boom. Fair enough. Look at the performance since, say, early 1994, when home prices were near a historic trough. Surely someone who bought then has made a bundle. (Read more at: WSJ.com)
___________
{Photography by Phil Romans}
U.S. home prices fall by record 19.1% in first quarter. Los Angeles area prices were down 41% from 2006 peak. Phoenix shows the most severe decline, 53%
U.S. home prices showed no signs they’ve hit bottom, according to a series of national indexes released today. The Standard & Poor’s/Case-Shiller national home price index showed a record 19.1% drop in home prices for the first three months of this year.
Los Angeles area home prices, which include Orange County, were down 41% in March from their 2006 peak. Los Angeles is one of 10 metro areas down more than 30% from its peak price level, with Phoenix’s 53% decline in March from its peak the most severe.
Dallas, where prices did not inflate to the same degree during the housing bubble as metro areas in California, Arizona and Nevada, recorded the smallest decline from its peak, 11%.
Los Angeles area prices are down 22% from March a year ago. Phoenix’s 36% March decline from last year led the nation, followed by San Francisco, where March prices were 30% below the same month the previous year. (Read more at: LATimes.com)
___________
{Photography by nola.agent}
New regulations signed into law by Obama could bring back the tight access and low limits of the ’50s
“I have never paid any interest,” said the 78-year-old retired teacher and salesman. “I clear the account every month, and I don’t run up a big bill.”
If the industry — and its customers — maintained the prudence of Hockett’s Depression-era upbringing, the new credit card law signed Friday by President Obama might never have been necessary.
Instead, most people probably have more in common with Barbara and Albert Sanchez, who got their cards decades later, on the other side of Fresno from Hockett and a world away from mid-century attitudes about debt. (Read more at: LATimes.com)
___________
{Photography by Don Nunn}
China warns Federal Reserve over ‘printing money’
China has warned a top member of the US Federal Reserve that it is increasingly disturbed by the Fed’s direct purchase of US Treasury bonds.
Richard Fisher, president of the Dallas Federal Reserve Bank, said: “Senior officials of the Chinese government grilled me about whether or not we are going to monetise the actions of our legislature.”
“I must have been asked about that a hundred times in China. I was asked at every single meeting about our purchases of Treasuries. That seemed to be the principal preoccupation of those that were invested with their surpluses mostly in the United States,” he told the Wall Street Journal.
His recent trip to the Far East appears to have been a stark reminder that Asia’s “Confucian” culture of right action does not look kindly on the insouciant policy of printing money by Anglo-Saxons.
Mr Fisher, the Fed’s leading hawk, was a fierce opponent of the original decision to buy Treasury debt, fearing that it would lead to a blurring of the line between fiscal and monetary policy – and could all too easily degenerate into Argentine-style financing of uncontrolled spending.
However, he agreed that the Fed was forced to take emergency action after the financial system “literally fell apart”.
Nor, he added was there much risk of inflation taking off yet. The Dallas Fed uses a “trim mean” method based on 180 prices that excludes extreme moves and is widely admired for accuracy. (Read more at: Telegraph.co.uk)
___________
{Photography by Diana Octavius}
How much is your identity worth?
HOW curious. Early this year my bank sent me a replacement credit card. I hadn’t asked for one, and the bank did not elaborate except to refer vaguely to “security” issues.
I still don’t know why my card was replaced, but I have a hunch: a massive electronic heist at a New Jersey-based company called Heartland Payment Systems. Heartland acts as a middleman between retailers and credit card companies, and processes about 100 million transactions every month. At some point in March 2008, a group of hackers is believed to have broken through the firm’s cyber-defences. They installed software that, for about four months, secretly relayed credit and debit card details to an external computer. It is likely that tens of millions of cards were hacked.
Like many other people, I initially missed the news about Heartland – perhaps because it was announced on the day of Barack Obama’s inauguration. But my belated discovery made me wonder what would have happened to my credit card details if they had been stolen. So I called internet security company Team Cymru, based in Burr Ridge, Illinois. A few weeks later, cybercrime experts Steve Santorelli and Levi Gundert introduced me to a sprawling criminal underworld so large and pervasive that no one can control it.
This underworld is surprisingly easy to access. It consists of a network of online chatrooms and web forums where stolen information is openly traded, along with off-the-shelf software tools needed to pull off just about every kind of online scam going. “This is an economy that is worth billions of dollars,” says Dean Turner of the security company Symantec in Calgary, Canada. “It’s highly organised. Everything that criminals need is available for sale.” (Read more at: New Scientist)
___________
{Photography by ChanChan222}
Job Losses Push Safer Mortgages to Foreclosure
As job losses rise, growing numbers of American homeowners with once solid credit are falling behind on their mortgages, amplifying a wave of foreclosures.
In the latest phase of the nation’s real estate disaster, the locus of trouble has shifted from subprime loans — those extended to home buyers with troubled credit — to the far more numerous prime loans issued to those with decent financial histories.
With many economists anticipating that the unemployment rate will rise into the double digits from its current 8.9 percent, foreclosures are expected to accelerate. That could exacerbate bank losses, adding pressure to the financial system and the broader economy.
“We’re about to have a big problem,” said Morris A. Davis, a real estate expert at the University of Wisconsin. “Foreclosures were bad last year? It’s going to get worse.” (Read more at: NYTimes.com)
___________
{Photography by Ben+Sam}
Credit-Card Consumer Protection Law May Reduce Purchasing Power
Jack Krupansky declared bankruptcy three and a half years ago. Now he worries the credit-card legislation Congress passed this week will make his banks, including Barclays Plc, penalize him as a riskier borrower.
“This legislation could boomerang and hurt the same people it’s designed to help during the credit crunch,” said Krupansky, 55, a freelance software developer in New York.
The “bill of rights” that U.S. President Barack Obama signed today is intended to protect cardholders from excessive fees and last-minute contract changes. It also may prompt banks to slash available credit by as much as $90 billion to avoid risk, said Robert Hammer, chief executive officer of R.K. Hammer Investment Bankers, an adviser to card companies.
That reduction could choke off a consumer-led recovery and hurt retailers struggling amid the longest recession since the 1930s, said Andrew Caplin, an economics professor at New York University. Consumer spending accounts for 70 percent of the U.S. economy.
“The bill may stop various forms of abuse, but it will also stop some various forms of credit,” Caplin said. “If the economic recovery is going to rely on consumer spending, it will be a long wait.”
In 2007, purchase volume on all U.S. consumer and commercial credit cards equaled $2.11 trillion, up 8.4 percent from 2006, according to the Nilson Report, the Carpinteria, California-based newsletter. (Read more at: Bloomberg.com)
___________
{Photography by Jason McHuff}
Not much change at Citibank. How can one expect anything different going forward?
Albert Einstein once said: “No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.”
At the recent Citibank’s (NYSE: C) shareholders’ meeting there were no change in the composition of the Board of Directors, or anyone significant at the top, therefore . . . following a layman’s logic, so eloquently put into words by Einstein, one can’t expect any change on Citibank’s operation and philosophy going forward.
So if you have a relationship of any kind with Citibank, be a shareholder, or having a checking account, or a credit card and you are happy with the past performance; you can reasonably expect the same in the future.
But if you are not happy with the past relationship, and you expect change, you need to ask yourself: can the same people that brought me here give me something different and better going forward? It might be time to be in the market for a new financial partner.
Related News: Board Stiff, by The New Yorker
___________
{Photography by Kiwanja}
|
|
