Credit Card Offers

Tune in to this week’s installment of The Credit Line, hosted by Credit.com’s chairman and co-founder Adam Levin on Los Angeles’ KFWB 980 AM this Saturday, July 9, at 9 a.m. PST/Noon EST.

The show is co-hosted by L.A. radio personality Jeff Levy.

Trapped in an Underwater Mortgage?  There is a Way Out.

In the first quarter of 2011, 23% of all residential properties with a mortgage were in negative equity, a.k.a. “underwater,” by an average of $65,000. Across the

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Customer run on IndyMac Bank in 2008

Even when he knew the economy was headed for the abyss, former CEO of IndyMac Bank Michael Perry “negligently” directed his company to sell $10 billion worth of risky mortgages that drove his company into bankruptcy, according to a lawsuit filed last week by the FDIC.

IndyMac was one of the largest mortgage lenders during the housing boom. Its bankruptcy in 2008 was the third-biggest banking failure in U.S. his

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The Federal Housing Administration recently told lenders who controlled mortgages it backed that they must offer 12 months of forbearance to qualified borrowers who are currently unemployed, according to the Department of Housing and Urban Development. A similar rule may also be applied to those institutions participating in the Home Affordable Modification Program in the near future, but there could be some regulatory and contractual roadblocks involved.

“We’ve had to revamp our housing program several times to try to help people stay in their homes and try to start lifting home values up,” President Barack Obama said at a town hall event earlier this week.

It’s expected that the policy changes will affect as many as tens of thousands of borrowers currently struggling with unemployment, the report said. In a re

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Women are more stressed about money than men, according to survey conducted Financial Finnesse and reported in Bloomberg. Thirty percent of women have “high levels of anxiety” about money, versus 17 percent of men, and nine percent of women have “overwhelming financial stress,” versus just three percent of men.

What could possibly account for this difference? Could it be the persistent gender pay gap that gives women just 80 cents for every dollar a man makes? Could it be that our culture raises women to aim lower and make less money right from the start? Or that

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In this series, I detail six possible ways to deal with an “underwater” home—one that’s worth less than the amount of money owed on it. Here is the first part of my six-part series.

Javier Gonzales is still legally a homeowner. But when people ask him if he owns a home, his first instinct is to say “no,” he says. He’s still paying the association fees and insurance on the townhome he bought in 2007, but he stopped paying the mortgage nearly two years ago, and he no longer lives there. “I don’t care about it, I don’t want it,” he says. Gonzales owes about $

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There is little doubt that it has become more difficult to get approved for new credit in these challenging economic times.  In response to sluggish employment and a stagnant economy, most lenders are still operating in a risk-averse mode and only approving those applicants with the most stellar credentials (high credit scores, high incomes, large down payments).  It gets even harder and more frustrating for those people who may have some degree of negative payment history showing on their credit reports and are trying to re-establish their credit history.

While there are no “sure-fire” means of easily re-establishing new credit, here are some strategies that have worked to help others in this same space:

Open a bank account. While bank account information (checking and savings accounts) is not typically reported to Equifax, Experian or TransUnion, this information is often requested on credit applications. In ad

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