The Sun's Financial Diary

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 [...]

Stocks are down (another 300-point plunge of the Dow today closing below 7,000 for the first time in 13 years) and savings account interest rates are declining too. Are you wondering where to put your money these days? Treasuries are safe, but you won’t get much from buying bonds/bills unless safety is your absolute concern. [...]

Yesterday, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. (FDIC) released its last quarter banking profile (PDF) of 2008 and the banking sector is still very weak, despite hundreds of billions of dollars infusion from the government. At the end of 2008, a total of 252 banks were placed on the FDIC’s problem bank list, up from 171 [...]

Quicken Online is improving. The online money management site just added a new feature to make tracking and managing your cash transactions easier. The new feature is called My Wallet. With My Wallet, you can manually enter cash transactions in Quicken by providing such information as Payee, Transaction Amount, and Category, as you can see [...]

Credit card issuers are getting more and more proactive in dealing with credit card holders these days. They want to protect themselves against default by increasing APRs on credit cards for some card members, then closing inactive cards without any warning. Now they will just give you cash to close your accounts, whether they are [...]

Lending Club is a SEC registered leading peer-to-peer (P2P) social lending platform, where borrowers with excellent credit can borrow money with rates starting at 7.88%. Lenders can enjoy an average 9.05% loan return. I have been thinking of getting into peer-to-peer lending as alternative way to invest for quite some time, but the idea has [...]

As part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, which was passed by the Congress over the weekend and signed into law by President Obama yesterday, the Treasury Department today released a fact sheet on details of the Homeowner Affordability and Stability Plan (PDF file) that will help struggled homeowners to fight foreclosure. [...]

A reader, Brenda, today commented on my American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 Breakdown post with the following question: When will we get the 250.00, those of us that are on S.S. or will we. When I read those articles on the stimulus plan after it was passed over the weekend, I didn’t see [...]