Filed under: Banks, Borrowing, Banking – Checking Account
Starting this August, if you try to use your debit card to make a purchase without having the funds in your linked checking account, that purchase will be declined. Right in the store. Or the restaurant. No longer will your bank be able to approve the transaction and then hit you with a $35 overdraft fee — unless you decide that you want to be able to charge without having the funds, and opt in – signing on some dotted line to signal that you want this protection.
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Filed under: Debt
Age discrimination comes in all forms. FindLaw.com, a legal information Web site, just came out with a new survey that indicates that the younger you are, the harder it will be to get a loan.
According to their survey, more than one in five (22%) people between the ages of 18 and 34 say that they’ve been turned down for a mortgage, loan or credit card within the last 12 months. But the percentages start doubling once you get to be 35 years of age or more.
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Filed under: Banks, Credit, Credit Cards, In the News
Banks may have successfully stopped efforts for an independent consumer finance agency, and we have Senator Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) to thank for their success. Based on news reports this morning, Dodd has worked out a compromise with Sen. Bob Corker, a Tennessee Republican, for a compromise that will kill the idea of an independent consumer finance agency and instead place it inside the Federal Reserve.
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Filed under: Banks
As you may have heard, Citibank messed up. Big time. It accidentally sent out more than 600,000 mailings to customers with their Social Security numbers printed on the outside of the envelopes.
One of WalletPop’s editors was one of those 600,000, and she received a letter from Citibank that read in part (entire contents at American Banking News):
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Filed under: Debt
Personal finance can be something like a horror movie. In this case, the slasher is an online payday lending service.
For anyone thinking of signing up and taking out a loan, the Better Business Bureau has just released a press release, warning anyone thinking of using an online payday lending service: Don’t.
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Filed under: Banks, Real Estate, Mortgages
Some experts believe an unintended consequence of credit card reform in the Credit Card Accountability Responsibility and Disclosure (CARD) Act may be to actually make it more difficult for a potential homeowner to get a mortgage loan.
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Filed under: Banks, Technology, Fraud, Identity Theft
It seems like the whole world has gone phishing in the last couple of weeks. Twitter, Facebook – even my own e-mail inbox is full of this crap.
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Filed under: Banks, Home, Real Estate, Recession, Refinancing
The Obama administration is reportedly considering a plan that would prohibit lending institutions from foreclosing on a home before a mortgage loan modification is given consideration. This is the sort of thing that may sound good on paper (especially after “draft proposals” were obviously leaked to news media) but, upon closer inspection, I’m afraid, smells of nothing more than spin.
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Filed under: Insurance, Health, Insurance – Health Insurance
After a very public display of partisanship at President Barack Obama’s health care summit on Thursday, the public clearly saw that no real attempt at bipartisanship is possible on the health bill. If the Democrats want to pass health care legislation this year they most likely will need to use what’s commonly called the “nuclear option,” but officially called, in Senate terms, “reconciliation” to solve differences between bills passed by the Senate and House. Generally these bills cannot include provisions that are “extraneous” to taxing and spending.
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Filed under: Banks
Were you worried about what happened to all of the banking executives who lost their jobs when the economy first started to tank?
What banking executives? Well, you know, people who used to work at Lehman Brothers, which collapsed Sept. 15, 2008, and kind of got this whole recession started (though officially it began almost a year earlier). And then there were all those Merill Lynch executives who were canned when the company was being swallowed up by Bank of America. And Bear Sterns, a stalwart on Wall Street since 1923, was absorbed by another bank. So, yeah, them. Were you worried, fretting if they were able to land on their feet? (Continue the story…)
