Hopefully, when you receive your credit card bill each month, you scan the itemized charges to make sure nothing looks amiss. And, if you do, at some point you may notice a charge for something you didn’t buy – or a charge that rang up incorrectly, or a charge with the decimal in the wrong [...]

Mint.com and WallStats.com have teamed up to create a tongue-in-cheek visual representation of some dangerous predatory lending products common in America today. The image is titled The Shaft: How Some Companies Prey on the Poor.
The graphic helps depict the reality of some benign-seeming products—and highlights how susceptible many lower-income Americans are to terrible credit products, [...]

Losing a wallet is the kind of super-stressful event that most of us don’t think will ever happen to us. And so we don’t prepare for it. But take a moment now to consider what you stand to lose if your wallet is lost or stolen: Money? Your driver’s license? Your credit card? Your credit [...]

The U.S. Department of Commerce released data this week on personal income for November, and the numbers look modestly positive, with a 0.4 percent increase in personal income last month. Further, the numbers show that:

Real disposable personal income rose 0.2 percent
Wages and salaries increased by $16.1 billion
Real personal consumption expenditures rose 0.2 percent
The saving rate [...]

The recession has been hard on a lot of Americans, in part because the decreased availability of credit now means that many people are seeing their accounts limited or closed for what seem like mysterious reasons.
Here’s a look at some potential explanations for why you may have seen your limit shrink recently.

Changes to Your Credit [...]