News Tips & Updates on Finance

If you're the parent of a child who's off to college this year, you have at least two relevant problems. First, you have to try to stop thinking of someone who's now shaving (face, legs, or both) as a child. Start now, and you could be ready to recognize him or her as an adult by the time you're some way into your nineties. Your second problem is decide on the advice and guidance you want to give your offspring about money in general, and student credit cards in particular. Let's start with some good news. Maybe because the apple of .......

There have been many stories in the media over the last several years -- some of them on this website -- about interchange fees. You may have skipped over them because they sound like something that would interest only credit card nerds. But the battle between retailers and credit card companies over those fees could have a very real impact on the plastic in your wallet. And you may not like what happens next. Credit cards and interchange fees Interchange fees, also known as swipe fees, are the cut (anywhere from 1 to 5 percent) of the transaction value that payment networks .......

PayPal president David Marcus is a blogger. Who knew? In one post he published on May 21, he reported on a recent survey his company had conducted, and he went on to say something startling: "...what people want most of all is to lose their wallets." It seems more likely that many respondents would like him to lose his wallet -- always providing they're the one to find it. Of course, Mr. Marcus wasn't reporting on a new, widespread madness afflicting the five territories (the U.S., U.K., Canada, Germany and Australia) in which the poll had been conducted. It wasn't that .......

Gas prices may go up and down, day by day and month by month, but as we all know, the underlying trend is a relentless rise. As recently as Feb. 28, 2005, you could fill up for less than $2 a gallon, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA). Happy days -- although we probably didn't think so at the time. Back then, many would have been nostalgic for the $1.10 Americans were paying exactly a decade earlier. There's no doubt that gasoline prices often have a painful impact on personal budgets. In another EIA report, it emerged that American .......

Last year, we told the story (in Credit where credit's due -- but only if you're lucky) of John G. Watts of Birmingham, Ala. The first time Mr. Watts knew he had an outstanding medical bill was when he was contacted by debt collectors. He immediately called the hospital, confirmed that the claimed $200 was -- in spite of his not having received an invoice -- legitimately owed, and the next day paid the collection agency in full. Credit report errors are serious Clearly someone had made a mistake, but, in spite of that, the collection company added a "paid collection account" .......

Why is it obligatory for all articles about identity theft to contain scary statistics? Maybe there's a law. Just in case, here are the latest (for 2010) from the Bureau of Justice Statistics, seemingly designed to have you hugging yourself in a corner, slowly rocking back and forth: That year, about 8.6 million American households contained at least one person over 11 years whose identity had been stolen. The total cost was $13.3 billion, and the average for each household that lost more than one dollar was $2,200. The unauthorized use of existing credit cards accounted for 54 percent of all identity thefts. .......

Thirty years ago, you could, according to retired IT professor John C. McCallum, have bought an external hard drive for your computer for $1,595. Its capacity would have been 5 Megabytes (MB), which comes out at $319 per MB. By February 2013, the cost per MB for data storage devices had dropped to $0.0000467. This phenomenal fall -- together with huge advances in software applications -- has made it very cheap indeed to capture, store and analyse all sorts of information, and that, in turn, has led to the coining of one of the latest buzz phrases: big data. Everyone's talking .......

Last February, we posed the question: Is Cash Really Going To Disappear? We were talking about new technologies -- such as near-field communications (NFC) and peer-to-peer (P2P) money transfers -- that might soon eradicate the need to carry bills and coins completely -- or almost completely. Instead, we'd carry smart phones, tablets and other soon-to-be-invented electronic devices. It's these, which would be linked to our debit and credit cards, that would allow us to perform virtually all our day-to-day transactions without bothering either the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, or the U.S. Mint. But now four young people have come up .......