Filed under: Credit, Debt, Personal Loans, 101 banking
With credit card interest rates soaring as high as 30%, people continue to look for alternatives to credit cards, especially when an emergency comes up. Personal loans can be a good option, but only if you have a good credit score; otherwise, the rates can be even higher than credit cards.
Filed under: Insurance, Health, Insurance – Health Insurance
With the threat of having to rebate customers if they make too much profit, Anthem Blue Cross withdrew its request for premium increases as high as 39%. That’s great news for an estimated 800,000 Californians who buy individual health insurance policies from Anthem Blue Cross, a subsidiary of WellPoint.
Filed under: Banks
People who get digital bank statements — not paper — are happier with their bank, according to a study researched by Javelin Strategy and Research.
The study was paid for by PayItGreen, a website whose mission is to convince people to choose electronic instead of paper statements. The website, incidentally, is funded by financial institutions like banks, financial industry service providers and numerous other businesses. (Continue the story…)
Filed under: Extracurriculars, Insurance
As someone who doesn’t golf much and has never hit a hole-in-one, no matter how good the odds, I don’t expect I’ll ever need hole-in-one insurance. But some people must, because there’s a market for it, among other types of odd insurance.
Golfers traditionally buy a round of drinks at the golf course bar after hitting a hole-in-one, and some bars have a hole-in-one jar for golfers to make occasional donations to and cover any future holes-in-one they might sink.
Filed under: Retire, Retirement Advice
How old will you be when you retire? Will you be 55 or 60? Will you be 65 or 70? And is the number you’ve settled on today larger than the one you might have picked a year or three ago?
The market may have come roaring back — as I write this, the Dow Jones Industrial Average is over 11,000, 68% higher than its March 2009 low. And many people who have continued to contribute to their retirement accounts have seen a return to 2007 levels. But the number of people who are planning to postpone retirement is up 24% in the past year, according to the Retirement Confidence Survey from the Employee Benefits Research Institute. The top two reasons? The poor economy (29%) and a change in employment (22%).
A friend recently came to me about a loan she had co-signed for her roommate to pay for culinary school. The roommate completed the program and got a job, but she wasn’t making enough money to pay off the loan. She deferred the loan as long as possible, and with each deferral, the loan balance kept growing and the interest rate kept increasing.
Then the roommate met a boyfriend and moved out. The boyfriend didn’t like my friend and talked her ex-roommate into forgetting about the loan. So she stopped making any payments on the student loan and left my friend with the bill. My friend wanted to know what she could do because she wanted to buy a house and she was pretty sure this would destroy any chance of her getting a loan. But if she made the payments on the student loan, then she wouldn’t be able to afford the house. Ah, what to do, what to do? (Continue the story…)
Filed under: Insurance, Travel, As Seen on TV, In the News
Hurricanes. Earthquakes. Riots. Airline strikes. Volcanic eruptions. There are so many things that could foil even the best laid vacation plans this summer.
Filed under: Banks, Banking – Savings Account, 101 banking
In the world of personal banking, credit unions always seem to come off as the good guys and banks, well, I probably don’t need to tell you which role they’re typically assigned.
Filed under: Banks, Banking – Checking Account, Banking – Savings Account
I still remember when online banks first appeared. People were wary of them because they were new. They were wary of putting their savings at a bank they couldn’t visit. They were wary of the higher interest rates. They were wary of unfamiliar names.
Filed under: Debt, Celebs & Money
If the news reports are to be believed, actress Lindsay Lohan, who may now be more famous for her tumultuous lifestyle than her movie career, is having difficulty keeping up the payments on her credit cards, which now total around $600,000.
But is it really true? After all, it was an unnamed source who gave this information to Radar Online, and then predictably, the blogosphere and numerous other media outlets, like the The New York Daily News, jumped on it. Meanwhile, Lohan’s mother, Dina, has said it’s not true, and it seems charitable to give her the benefit of the doubt.