A new online tool from Chase is garnering a fair amount of media attention recently. Known as Blueprint, it is part of a broad media campaign hoping to convince you that J.P. Morgan Chase wants to help you manage your finances (as well as rack up interest rate and fee charges!).
Chase Blueprint offers certain [...]

Credit card companies have no doubt spent billions of dollars on advertising in order to get their credit card in a consumer’s wallet or purse. As a result, they have collected billions of dollars in payments from consumers on credit card balances and debt. Surprisingly, one credit card company decided to return some of that money to its cardholders this week. Only this time, rather than cash back rebates, frequent flier miles, or a no interest balance transfer to increase their use of plastic, they did so to get them to stop reaching for their credit card of choice.

Select American Express credit card holders will receive $300 to pay off the remaining balance on their American Express card by April 30th and close their account.

The Wall Street Journal has just reported that a provision allowing corporations to defer taxes when they buyback their debt at a discount from their bond holders / creditors will remain in the economic stimulus package.  While I support the provision, I find it unfortunate that Congress has not extended the proposal to consumers who [...]

JP Morgan Chase took action recently to cut off the supply of low cost credit it offered to consumers through promotional balance transfer rates.  I’m sure that we all remember the good old days when banks offered a low interest rate balance transfer at a fixed rate for the life of the balance of the [...]

When creditors last fall asked the U.S. Government to expand the time limits for the repayment of debt through their partial debt forgiveness plans, as well as extend the time for writing off debt forgiven through the plan, I wondered if the federal government would opt to clarify the options for debtors unable to pay [...]

A reader of Credit Card Debt Law was recently wondering what would happen to their credit card debt if the bank that issued their credit card (and to whom they owed the debt) failed.  This topic has also come to my attention because many are wondering what will happen to the money that they owe [...]

Paul Solman of The Business Desk on the PBS website received a question from an individual wondering if government money wouldn’t better be spent to pay off all of the outstanding credit card debt of Americans.  While to some extent we’ve already got a system to handle out of control credit card debt - known [...]

When I was taking a political science class in college, we learned about the problem of “fighting the last war.”  If you’re successful in fighting the last war, you will continue to prepare as you always have and may ignore important changes to the battlefield that change your prospects for winning the next war.  It’s [...]

Various news outlets reported on Thursday that Democratic Senators and Citigroup had reached an agreement to allow bankruptcy judges to modify the terms of mortgages for homeowners in the bankruptcy process.  The financial industry has previously opposed the procedure, known as “cramdowns,” which force mortgage modifications on debt holders.  The hope is that bankruptcy judges [...]

Today was a busy day for economic news.  President-elect Barack Obama announced his economic stimulus plan, Wal-Mart decreased its earnings outlook after weaker than expected holiday sales, the Labor Department released data that almost half a million more Americans joined the unemployment line last week, and consumer borrowing fell a record $7.9 billion in November [...]