Credit card issuers continue to raise the stakes as they compete for customers with ultra-high credit scores, dangling sign-up incentives that can be worth more than $1,000. To get these bonuses, cardholders need to meet spending thresholds and often pay hefty annual fees. Banks are gambling that consumers will find the trade-offs worth it.
LivingSocial, the second-biggest company in the daily deal space (behind Groupon), is pairing up with Chase to introduce its own line of credit cards. But the idea isn’t as offbeat as it might first sound.
Still don’t know what to do with all those gift cards you got for the holidays? United Airlines will now take them off your hands in exchange for frequent flyer miles.
Your 2011 tax documents are beginning to arrive in the mail, signaling the start of another tax filing season. Right on cue, financial firms are in a spending battle to win the business of anyone considering an IRA rollover as part of their tax strategy and retirement savings plan.
What’s in your wallet? For travelers who sign up for credit cards left and right and strategically compile bonus points and miles in order to see the world for next to nothing, answering that question takes some time.
Store reward programs seem like a great deal for shoppers, with instant discounts and special offers not available to non-members. But there are tradeoffs to all these deals. Retailers haven’t designed and instituted these programs out of pure kindness and the generosity of their bottom-line hearts, and at some point the savvy consumer must ask: [...]
Here’s what this week’s scouring of the web for good (or at least amusing) personal finance advice has yielded:
A new generation of credit cards is being outfitted with all sorts of bells and whistles. Actually, with technology way more sophisticated (complicated?) than mere bells and whistles: lights, a slim battery that lasts four years, an embedded computer chip, and buttons that allow you to make purchases using regular old credit, or with rewards [...]
“I’ll pay off the balance on my credit card and move on.”
Included in this week’s roundup: colleges where tuition is free, best online savings accounts, stuff the cell-phone companies won’t tell you, unconventional ways to find jobs, worst items to buy at drugstores, reasons you might want to totally ignore your credit score, and justifications for why you’re not buying a diamond engagement ring for your [...]
CVS’s ExtraCare rewards program promises a lot: 2% back on everything you buy in the store, along with an “Extra Buck” for every two prescriptions filled. The problem is that an unknown (but presumably huge) number of customers never realize those rewards.
