Filed under: Insurance, Technology
Increasingly, our lives are being organized and connected to others through gadgets — smart phones, iPads and iPhones — which go wherever we go. While these gadgets share our adventures, often they don’t come through the experience as well as we do, as evidenced by these seven gadget deaths, which Aaron Cooper, director of marketing for Worth Ave Group, an Insurance provider for smart phones and gadgets, shared with WalletPop.
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Filed under: Credit, Debt, Credit Reports, Credit Cards
Despite experts now saying the recession officially ended in June, the job market is still bleak. Many Americans have lost their jobs, had their wages or hours cut or go to work every day praying they don’t come home with a pink slip. While many of us feel powerless about our employment situations, one area where we can — and should — take charge is in our credit card habits before and during a period of unemployment.
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Filed under: Debt, Credit Cards
A research firm predicts that credit card use could fall to 45% of all transactions this year if current trends continue. According to Javelin Strategy & Research, our use of credit cards has been dropping steadily; we used credit cards for 56% of all transactions last year, which was a steep drop from the 87% of all transactions in 2007, when our obsession with plastic peaked.
“The main reason I would say is the recession, because it really affected consumer spending behavior and habits,” Beth Robertson, director of payments research at Javelin, told WalletPop in a phone interview. “The savings rate went up, consumption overall went down and people shifted to methods that helped them more carefully monitor their expenditures.”
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Filed under: Retire, Wealth
How much money did you receive as a parting gift when you were fired from your last job? Once you’ve stopped laughing, take a moment to check out the top golden parachutes awarded to top executives who failed, but failed big. This graphic by our friends at Mint.com might just turn your laughter to tears.
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Filed under: Budgets, Debt, Family Money, 101 credit&debt
When a professional meeting planner in Melville, N.Y. began dating the man who would eventually leave her $100,000 in debt, there were some clear warnings signs that he was having trouble with his finances. A part-time comedian, he used to joke about how he was only with her because of her secure job and good corporate benefits. “He used to make so many of these jokes,” she recalls.
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Filed under: Borrowing, Debt, Real Estate, Fraud, Consumer Ally, Mortgages, Refinancing
Inquiries and complaints about so-called forensic loan audits, aimed at getting mortgage modifications, are soaring — leading consumer groups to warn that many of them are scams. Consumers need to know what they are getting before hiring a business that offers forensic mortgage loan audits because mistakes could literally cost the house.
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Filed under: Retire, Retirement – 401(k), Retirement – 403(b), Retirement Advice, In the News
Insurers are asking Labor and Treasury department officials to make it easier for employers to include annuities in their retirement plans, because Americans are outliving their savings. The two-day hearing in Washington continues today.
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Filed under: Banks, Credit, Credit Cards
We’ve written recently about some tricky things credit card companies do that can whittle away at the value of your hard-earned rewards, and recent news reported in the Consumer Reports blog illustrates that banks are still trying — and trying very hard, in some cases — to keep you from getting those perks.
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Filed under: Banks, Debt, Credit Cards
Over the past several months, several encouraging reports of the decrease in evolving consumer debt have been published. Revolving debt, which consists primarily of outstanding credit card balances, fell by roughly $12 billion in the second quarter of 2010 from the quarter prior, according to the Federal Reserve. But there’s just one problem with that, according to new research from CardHub.com: All of that drop and then some was due to banks throwing in the towel on bad loans and charging off delinquent balances.
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Filed under: Banks, Debt, Credit Cards
Over the past several months, several encouraging reports of the decrease in evolving consumer debt have been published. Revolving debt, which consists primarily of outstanding credit card balances, fell by roughly $12 billion in the second quarter of 2010 from the quarter prior, according to the Federal Reserve. But there’s just one problem with that, according to new research from CardHub.com: All of that drop and then some was due to banks throwing in the towel on bad loans and charging off delinquent balances.
(Continue the story…)
Increasingly, our lives are being organized and connected to others through gadgets — smart phones, iPads and iPhones — which go wherever we go. While these gadgets share our adventures, often they don’t come through the experience as well as we do, as evidenced by these seven gadget deaths, which Aaron Cooper, director of marketing for Worth Ave Group, an Insurance provider for smart phones and gadgets, shared with WalletPop.
