Charge Responsibly Blog

We all know by now – after feeling the negative impact of the recession, the credit crunch, and the high rates of unemployment – that it pays to be smart about how we use credit and manage our levels of debt. Right before the worst of the global recession and credit crisis hit, for example, the average American consumer was carrying such a large burden of debt that he or she was actually earning less each month that was being spent.

 

You cannot continue to balance your finances if you are spending more than a dollar for every dollar you bring home from work, but that is exactly what millions of Americans were doing. That’s why the average USA saving rate – which calculates how much money the typical household saves versus how much they spend – was in negative territory ...

A bank that created a rewards card that was named “The Best Credit Card if You Want Travel Perks” by the widely read and popular magazine Kiplinger's Personal Finance is celebrating its first anniversary. U.S. Bank launched the FlexPerks Travel Rewards Visa Signature credit card a year ago, and the new card was really well received and successful – which explains why Kiplinger’s rated the card so highly. FlexPerks cardholders, for example, redeemed more than a billion rewards points within just two months during the weeks leading up to the FlexPerk one-year anniversary.

Cliff Cook, who is the chief marketing officer for U.S. Bank Retail Payment Solutions, used the anniversary occasion to explain some of the reasons why his company thinks the card has been so wildly appealing to consumers who like to travel and earn travel rewards.

“FlexPerks has been a huge success because our customers know that we provide them with tremendous ...

2010 is a year full of technological surprises and innovations, from new types of electronic book readers and Internet-enabled cell phones to the fast-selling Apple iPad computer device. Meanwhile social networking is occupying the time of hundreds of millions of people of all ages. People are constantly using devices and sites like Twitter and Facebook to connect or reconnect with friends, do business networking, post blogs or videos, keep up with their celebrity icons, or just get a glimpse into the lives of other people in the tech-connected universe. But now, in addition to the many social shopping Web sites that have been around for a long time, there is a new trend emerging that involving tracking your purchases through social media mechanisms.

The newest contributor to this rather strange and different kind of high-tech social networking phenomenon is a company called Swipely. Swipely basically tracks your credit card swipes – and those of lots of other ...

Banks are still under pressure from Capitol Hill when it comes to charging high fees on credit cards, but this time it is not about fees and rates that you pay as a cardholder. Now the attention has shifted to dealing with the way credit card merchants – those retailers who accept plastic as payment from customers like you – are being treated by the credit card companies.

Each time a merchant at a store, restaurant, hotel, or other business swipes your card they gets charged a merchant fee. This fee, credit card companies say, helps to pay for the most of providing and maintaining the sophisticated system and technological infrastructure that has to be in place in order for us to do tens of millions of credit card transaction per day at card terminals around the globe. But many merchants – especially those who are small business owners based in the USA – say that they are paying way too much to the card companies. These merchant fees typically ...

In response to new and more stringent regulations regarding consumer protection, credit card companies have unveiled a whole range of new card features that are intended to help you manage your money and track your expenses. Some of these cards – like Chase Freedom, to name just one – are pretty helpful, especially if you have a hard time keeping up with your monthly purchases, sticking to a budget, or figuring out exactly what is the best way to quickly and effectively pay off your credit card balances and save more money.

Most of these new menus of features include on that allows you to isolate a specific purchase and pay it off sooner in order to avoid paying excessive interest. Or you can list some everyday expenses for recurring purchases like groceries or gas, and the card will put those into a special category and let you pay them off each month – even while you’re carrying other purchases over as an outstanding balance. ...