Banks, the thinking goes, have never met a fee they didn’t like. Yet one credit card charge that has been standard for years—the “foreign transaction” or “foreign currency” fee, which tacks on an extra 3% or so to every hotel stay, meal, or tchotchke purchased outside the U.S.—is slowly but surely being dropped by more and more card issuers. Why?
If ever there was a truism, it’s that everybody hates taxes—this week especially. Or do they? In at least a handful of situations, a surprisingly large portion of Americans favor introducing new taxes or jacking up the rates on existing ones.
Paying less than your neighbor for everything from ketchup to cars often boils down to carefully timing your purchases right. The best time to get a deal often isn’t when you need the item at hand, but when the magic mix of seasonality, low consumer demand, and the likelihood that retailers are swimming in excess [...]
Groupon’s “Reserve” daily deal program, which focuses on fancy tasting menus and other luxury offerings, is spreading to its fourth U.S. city, Los Angeles.
Will that be credit, debit or 23-karat gold? For a small number of very wealthy consumers, that’s not a hypothetical question. The JPMorgan Chase Palladium card is made out of laser-etched palladium and gold. It makes even the standard-bearer for high-roller credit cards — the American Express Centurion or Black Card — pale in comparison. [...]
The vast majority of citizens feel that it’s never OK under any circumstances to cheat on your income taxes. But, in a survey conducted last year by the IRS, the percentage of people thought it was acceptable to cheat “as much as possible” doubled compared to 2010.
Designer clothes, iPads, car leases, vacation packages, baby clothes, diapers … If you’re a celebrity, you’ll receive all of this and more for free, without ever having to endorse or even request anything.
Tensions in the U.S. between rich and poor are at a 20-year high, according to a new study from Pew Research. This conflict now tops the discord between blacks and whites, young and old, and immigrants and the native-born.
Retailers and restaurants love gift cards—so much so that they load them with bonus cash in order to sell more cards. This makes total sense once you realize how often gift cards aren’t used at all, and how all those cards add up to billions of dollars in profits.
We’ve all heard of how the rich have gotten richer over the past several decades—the “great divergence,” as it’s been called, in which a small portion of the population has garnered an increasingly outsized percentage of net worth and income. (The 1%, as the ultra-rich are known, also own many of the world’s most lavish [...]
In a survey of Americans holding at least $1 million in investments, more than two-thirds of respondents (67%) say that taxes should be raised on people earning $1 million and up annually.
