The Sun's Financial Diary

The new credit card regulations that aim to rein in excessive, and sometimes abusive, practices by credit card companies won’t take effect until July 2010. Congress is proposing a new legislation that will further regulate the credit card industry, protect consumers, and, hopefully, speed up the implementation of the new rules passed by federal agencies [...]

Are you still receiving paper statements from your banks, credit card issuers, or phone companies?
Since I do transactions, such as checking account activities, paying bills, and transferring funds, I want to eliminate paper statements all together if I can because there’s nothing on the paper that I can’t find online. So there’s just no reason [...]

Over the past several years, I have acquired a couple of travel rewards credit cards, including AMEX Delta SkyMiles Card, Discover Miles Card, and Citi PremierPass Card. Though I don’t travel a lot, I’d like to have a card that gives better rewards for travel than a everyday card like the Fidelity 529 Card I am [...]

There’s an article on Consumer Reports website last week with the organization’s latest test results on toilet papers (which will also appear in the May issue of Consumer Report magazine). The article has some interesting findings that could affect which brand we will buy in the future.
We have been using Scott 1000-sheet single ply paper [...]

After having been mostly in the credit card accumulation mode for years, it seems that the time to cut down my “holdings” has finally come. The main reason that I probably will never use some of the cards again because they don’t offer any reward that’s better than those cards I am actively using now. [...]

Whenever you receive a replacement credit card, the issuer always asks you to destroy the old card, like cut it in half, so the old card can no longer be used. Do you always follow what you are told to do?

I don’t know about you, but I never destroyed a single card and never thrown [...]

Early last week, I received my brand new UPromise Credit Card from Bank of America. The look, however, isn’t the only change that was made after UPromise switched the card’s association from Citibank to BofA. The rewards program itself also got an upgrade.
I have been a UPromise credit card member since 2002, using it to [...]

This could be a hot credit card.
Citibank launched a brand new credit card today, called Forward Visa Card, which the bank claims will “help you see rewards of maintain healthy credit.” After a quick glance, it does seem to be a very rewarding card because card member will not only enjoy rewards (in ThankYou Points) [...]

SmartMoney yesterday published an article on 10 practices that credit card companies use to get more money out of us, their customers. Even though some of them, such as universal default and two-cycle billing, will be banned when the new credit card rules take effect, which is still more than a year away, we should [...]

And it could be the end of my credit card arbitrage game.
I applied and was approved for a Citi Driver’s Edge card in early 2008. The reason for me to get that card wasn’t for the rewards it offers, but solely for the purpose of getting an interest free loan from the card and using [...]