Interest rates on new credit card offers held steady at 14.95 percent Wednesday, according to the CreditCards Continue reading →

Mobile payments made some headway toward becoming a mainstream way to buy stuff in 2012, according to research from IDC Financial Insights. In its Consumer Payment Survey, conducted in May 2012, the research firm measured a big jump between 2011 and 2012 in the percentage of respondents who said they used a mobile phone to make a purchase.

The umbrella term "mobile payments" encompasses a variety of payment methods, including apps (such as mobile wallets), mobile browsers, contactless technology (such as near field communication ) and text. Although all methods were about equally popular among the survey’s respondents, mobile apps took a slight lead, with almost 50 percent of respondents saying they’d used them to make a payment.

The charts below show the significant leap in popularity in mobile payments as a whole Continue reading →

Consumers are going to be eating up more of their credit and asking lenders for more, according to a December 2012 survey for FICO conducted by the Professional Risk Managers’ Internal Association (PRMIA). This may be promising news for an economy hit hard by consumers’ credit shyness over the past five years.

"These results indicate that 2013 could be the year that Americans begin to embrace credit again, after the considerable deleveraging we’ve seen since 2008," said Dr. Andrew Jennings, chief analytics officer at FICO, which sponsored the survey, in a news release.

For the survey, FICO and PRMIA polled bank risk management professionals and asked for their predictions for the next six months regarding consumer’ and lenders’ behavior Continue reading →

Rewards strategists are discovering new ways to multiply points and miles fast using prepaid and reload cards. It’s a bit like getting rewards for a cash advance, then using the advance to pay large bills without incurring convenience fees. In some instances you can even pay the bill for your rewards credit card with your prepaid, indirectly earning rewards twice for a purchase.

"It’s stupid to not take advantage of this concept of buying reloadable cards with your miles-earning credit card and then loading them onto prepaid cards that you can then use throughout your daily life," says Brian Kelly, who blogs at The Points Guy Continue reading →

Cashing In Cathleen McCarthy is a journalist whose articles on travel, commerce and consumer topics have appeared in dozens of publications. She writes “Cashing In,” a weekly column about credit card rewards programs, for CreditCards Continue reading →