Credit Card Offers

It’s high season for prospective college students, as they and their families compare colleges and decide how to finance what is often one of life’s biggest expenses. After tapping savings and 529 plans (assuming parents or guardians have been contributing over the years) there’s almost always a shortage. And while some parents feel obliged to do all the financial heavy-lifting (with some foolishly tapping into their 401‘s), let’s remember that there are many more safe and affordable ways to fill the tuition gap. Here are

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Today’s top news headlines feature significant declines in consumer spending and the top U.S. cities that may take years to recover from the recession. Plus, find out why more couples choose to live together without getting married.

Number Of Unmarried Couples Living Together On The Rise MSNBC A recent report shows that more couples – namely those without college degrees – are choosing to move in together rather than tying the knot. The Pew Research study shows cohabitation among those without college degrees has doubled over a 15-year period, while the marriage rate has fallen. Altho

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Plenty of people do their banking without a bank. They use prepaid debit cards. They send money using services like Western Union. They sign up for services promising to get them out of debt.

Now a government watchdog agency wants to patrol these companies too, making sure that people who bank without banks get similar protections as people who use traditional financial institutions. In an announcement last week, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau said it may eventually regulate the largest companies in a host of industries.

“Historically, banks, thrifts, and credit unions have been subject to examinations by federal regulators, but other types of companies providing consumer financial services generally have not,” according to the bureau’s press release. “Toda

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Credit unions are known to be more stable than banks, and more generous when it comes to supplying customers with favorable interest rates on their deposits. They’re able to do this because, unlike traditional banks, they don’t rely on a fractional reserve system (meaning the bank reserves just a fraction of cash and other liquid deposits) when it comes to the possession of available funds. Instead, credit unions act as non-profit cooperatives, and all of the money deposited in a credit union stays within the institution for the sole use of its customers. In

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For people with debit cards, Wednesday is The Big Day. Finally, after a year-long, multi-million-dollar fight between big banks and big retailers, the Federal Reserve will announce its new rules for debit card swipe fees.

It could be the end of the debit card as we know it.

“This will be a game changer,” says Gerri Detweiler, Credit.com’s consumer credit expert. “Depending on what comes out, it could make a major difference for what our debit cards look like in the future.”

Every time you buy something with a debit card, the bank that issued the card gets a swipe fee, known as an “interchange fee” in bank-ese. Right now, th

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New statistics from Mintel Comperemedia revealed that the number of offers for new credit card accounts mailed by the nation’s top lenders ballooned to more than 1.4 billion, an increase of 69 percent over the 826 million sent out in the same quarter last year, according to the Wall Street Journal. Nearly two-thirds of those offers were sent to households with an annual income of more than $75,000, and 59 percent of all offers included some kind of incentive.

“As people think about risk, credit cards are an area where they feel comfortable building up their portfolios,” Jud Linville of Citigroup’s huge $110 billion credit card business, told the newspaper.

However, credit card offerings still haven’t rebounded from the levels observed before the recession set in, the report said. In the fo

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