The Best Student Credit Card Rewards and Offers

By MoneyBlueBook

The Best Credit Cards For College Students and Graduates To Learn Credit Responsibility

If you are a college or graduate student, it's important to understand that proper credit card management is a trait and skill that should be developed sooner than later in life. If you are the parent of a teenage child who is currently a college student, it's very important to teach him or her the importance of building up a good credit history while he or she is still in school, before entering the real working world where credit card mistakes and shortcomings are more brutal. The FICO credit score is heavily dependent on the length and quality of each person's long term credit history, so it's in the student's best interest to develop good credit usage habits and responsible management skills early on. Avoiding credit altogether out of fear or mistrust of credit cards is a misguided approach in my opinion. How else will a student develop the financial management skills he or she will need to succeed in this technologically and financially driven world?

Knowledge and Education Is Power, So If You Are A Parent, Be Sure To Teach Your Student Or Teen Financial Responsibility Early and Often

Many parents today are afraid of giving their college age teen the huge financial responsibility of using a credit card. But shielding them away from this altogether may hurt them in the future due to their lack of exposure to basic finance skills and their lack of credit history. They may

By MoneyBlueBook

I'm a frequent credit card user. In fact, I carry only enough cash on my person for emergencies at all times. I charge everything and over the years I must have signed tens of thousands of credit card receipts whenever I made purchases in person. The thing I've noticed is that nobody ever checks the signature nowadays. Is there a point in this modern day and age to require signatures on credit card receipts anymore?

Credit Cards Should Use PIN Numbers - Signatures Offer Little Security

Requiring customers to sign every receipt is supposed to make them feel safer and in control. With more and more people buying things online though, signatures are losing the identity assurances that they might have once offered. Most online retailers require customers to enter in their 3 digit verification code (CVV/CVC) found on the back of their credit cards for security purposes. I think requiring some type of PIN number would be more effective than signatures since signatures can be so easily overlooked and forged.

I don't even sign my full signature anymore. I've done everything from scribbling randomly on the signature line, to drawing a smiley face, to asking my friend to sign my name instead - all while under the watchful gaze of the sales clerk, who frankly could care less if I signed it personally or not.

For the sake of speed and convenience, many credit card companies don't even require signatures anymore for small purchases or at certain places such as fast food restaurants. Although seemingly counter-intuitive, merchants

By MoneyBlueBook

The Internal Revenue Service is at it again - trying to steal our hard earned dollars. Just kidding. This time it's not really the IRS, but someone trying to masquerade as them. Recently I've been receiving spoofed emails from someone trying to impersonate the IRS to solicit confidential financial information from me. Screenshot of the Scammer's E-Mail Message - looks real doesn't it? But it's a fake.

Spoofing and Phishing

Spoofed e-mails are forged messages where the e-mail header is altered to appear to have come from someone else other than the true source. Many of these spoofed e-mails come from scammers who send these messages out on a massive scale to unwitting recipients to try to get people to respond to them. Spoofed emails are frequently disguised to be from places of authority such as government agencies or banks, usually asking for sensitive and confidential data such as name, login, password, credit card numbers, and social security information. This disguised request for sensitive data is known as phishing and is a frequently used tactic by scammers to fish for and steal confidential information. Be careful, once confidential financial data has been harvested, the stolen information is usually used for criminal purposes.

I've seen so many of these types of spoofed e-mails from scammers over the years, mostly disguised to be from well known banks like Wells Fargo, Citibank, Sun Trust, and other major online sites like PayPal, eBay, and now the Internal Revenue Service. Through the untrained eye, it might be

By MoneyBlueBook

The holiday season is a time for good memories and cheer. But it's also a time when people are looser with their wallets, more readily open to the idea of spending more money than usual on presents for family, friends, and loved ones. It's easy to take out the ole credit card, swipe it through and not worry about it until later. But that later time will ultimately arrive in less than a month. When you finally open up your next bill or when you log into your online account to check your statement balance, prepare to be stunned. Somebody's going to have to pay all that back to the credit company and I'm betting it's going to be you.

Don't Let Holiday Shopping Hype Force You To Make Bad Decisions

Just because it's the holiday shopping season doesn't mean you have to forget all the frugal living common sense you acquired throughout the year. Don't throw all that out of the window. Christmas and the other holidays are still a month away. You still have ample time to plan ahead to make sure you are making the most efficient use of your shopping budget. Don't panic and start hitting the department stores without doing your research first to make sure you are using all of the available coupons and discounts out there.

Here Are A Few Of My Thoughts and Common-Sensical Tips Regarding Holiday Shopping

By MoneyBlueBook

J.D. Roth From Get Rich Slowly posted an entry today on his blog in which he drew attention to those popular Visa ads that promote the use of credit cards as the new trendy and speedy way to make everyday purchases. In case you've been living in a cave with your fingers stuck in your ears, or you just don't watch much television, here's the commercial we are talking about:

The message is pretty self evident - Using credit cards is fun, fast, and everyone is doing it, so don't get left out. Only those who aren't hip or "with it" use cash. The spinning shoppers in the commercial represent the gears of everyday commerce that grinds to a halt when someone like the lone, meekly man at the end attempts to use cash to make his purchase. The gesture causes everyone to drop everything in their hands in stunned shock - food, drinks, and all.

Using Credit and Debit Cards Is Much More Efficient

J.D. seems to really dislike the commercial as he sees it as a misguided attempted to demonize the usage of cash. I personally like the commercial and must disagree with his views on this one. I find that credit cards are almost always exponentially faster than using cash. Every time I go grocery shopping, I always dread following after someone in the checkout line who plans on using cash or even worse, checks. Cash is cumbersome and there is always the inevitable pause as the sales clerk and customer fumble

By MoneyBlueBook

I'm a big fan of Citibank and I really like the variety of financial products they offer. I like the fact that they have a national banking presence and that's one of the reasons why I have my primary checking and savings account with them. I especially like their credit cards since many of them provide unique credit card offers not available with any other company. Citibank also has a nice website that offers many convenient features for its customers. One of the nice functions is the option to request an automatic credit limit increase online without the need for a hard credit pull. When you request automatic limit increase through your Citibank online account, only a soft inquiry is made of your credit report.

This a wonderful feature since not all credit card companies offer this automatically. Other issuers will increase your limit upon request, but the manual request usually involves a hard credit inquiry.

Why Would I Want to Increase My Credit Limit?

The most obvious reason you would want to increase your credit limit is to enhance your ability to make more monthly purchases or to purchase more expensive items using your card. If you started out with a low credit limit and find yourself frequently nearing or reaching your maximum limit, a credit increase would likely be beneficial. Another reason would be to improve your FICO credit score by lowering your overall credit utilization ratio. Credit utilization ratio is a major component used to compute your FICO credit score, and you