Don’t Quit Your Day Job – Personal Finance, Economics and Investing

Like I mentioned in my article yesterday, this week ushers in the new credit card laws. On Monday, the provisions of the Credit CARD Act of 2009 took effect, to the joy of consumers everywhere. Well, not all consumers. Confused? Don’t be. The new credit laws will increase the cost of credit for people with worse credit scores.

Even though I lifted the moniker from this article on CNN Money, the scare quotes are appropriate. I’ve written about the Credit Card Act of 2009 and its unintended consequences. Lucky for you, the law is starting to bear fruit. We’ve seen issuers who offer cards with 79.9% interest rates, at least this article features a few cards with redeeming qualities. Anyway, you can tell the title is a bit tongue in cheek, but let’s tackle the features in the three cards shown.

Merry Christmas Eve to all my Christian readers, I’ve got a gift for you a day early. What if you could take your credit card now, make it so you can’t run a balance, and add an annual fee? Sound like something you might be interested in? Me neither. However, that’s exactly how a charge card compares to a traditional credit card.

Carnivals and featured links for the week.

Yes, the title has a double meaning. New credit card rules to be enacted with the Credit Card Act of 2009 will shake up the agreements you have with your credit card company. Because of new rules which will make it harder to increase fees and APRs after cards are issued, issuing companies will be forced to make terms more onerous up front. How far will you let companies go before you cancel?

There’s nothing worse than having something taken from you that you once had. As Alexis de Tocqueville remarks so elegantly in Democracy in America, “The heart of man is not so much caught by the undisturbed possession of anything valuable as by the desire, as yet imperfectly satisfied, of possessing it, and by the incessant dread of losing it.” Citi Cards stared down the rule makers, and unfortunately for their responsible customers, they blinked first. Maybe I’m being too melodramatic, but what I’ll illustrate in this article is merely symptomatic of the sweeping changes you may see in the credit card industry in the near future.

I feel it necessary to shill for Mint for a bit… and no, this is not a paid post…

Mint.com is a financial website in the vein of Quicken Online or Yodlee which allows you to aggregate the information from the vast majority of your financial accounts in one place. I’ve been using Mint for 13 months now, and have seen a number of the improvements to the service in that time. As an aggregator, Mint is very good at what it does. Going beyond a financial snapshot, Mint even has some analytical features that I find useful. I’ll take a look at some of the good features and caveats in this article.