Best Credit Cards for You!

Give your tires a visual once-over whenever you fuel up, and once a month use a digital tire gauge to make sure your tires have the pressure level required for your car. You can find pressure level on a sticker in the doorjamb on the driver side or in the owner’s manual. You can improve your fuel economy by up to 3.3% by keeping your tires at the proper pressure, according to the U.S. Department of Energy.

Although the accepted rule of thumb has been to change oil every 3,000 miles, Edmunds says that’s an outdated rule that wastes oil and money. The average car has an oil change interval of around 7,800 miles, but check your owner’s manual to make sure you aren’t going too long between changes, needlessly having them done too often.

According to the U.S. Department of Energy, a tune-up can improve a vehicle’s gas mileage by an average of 4%, depending on the type of repair needed and how well it is done.

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Are you confronted with a possible short sale or foreclosure on your home? If so, you may be wondering how long it will take your FICO scores to FULLY recover after one of these bombshells hits your credit reports.

It’s a great question, and it happens to be one that we receive emails about every day. Well, now we have some hard data from FICO that finally helps clear up all the confusion around FICO scores, short sales, and foreclosures.

Check out this chart: Estimated Time for FICO Score to Fully Recover, which was released yesterday on one of FICO’s blogs.

Essentially, what FICO’s telling us is that if you have a good starting score (780), it will take your FICO score about 7 years to fully recover. In addition, there’s absolutely no difference in recovery time among short sales or foreclosures.

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Tags: Short, Short Sales

Foreign transaction fees are charges commonly added to your credit card statement when you make a purchase in another country. Card issuers say these fees are in place to account for the currency exchange from one country to another, but speculation always exists about where this money really goes. Most foreign transaction fees usually range from 2% to 3% and are billed per transaction. Even if you aren’t traveling, it is possible that a purchase you make with a foreign merchant may also incur a foreign transaction fee.

It is wise to monitor your credit card statements on a regular basis to watch for fraudulent purchases or incorrect charges. When you first see a foreign transaction fee you might be a little confused or alarmed. These fees are very common with most credit card issuers, including American Express, Bank of America, Chase, Citibank, HSBC, Wells Fargo, and Discover Card.

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Tags: Fees, Foreign Transaction, Foreign Transaction Fees, Transaction Fees

Robert Frank at the WSJ looked at the latest audit statistics in the IRS Data Book and discovered that the IRS audited more than 18% of returns with income of at least $10 million. This is an increase of 80% from 2009, when only 10% were audited. Audit rates increased for other income groups as well, though most sharply for the higher brackets.

If you look at the statistics, it’s actually quite fascinating. Every income range in the Data Book showed an increase in audits, though the $10mm or more crowd saw the greatest jump.

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Tags: Irs, Irs Audits

There are many people that have credit cards with high interest rates on which they still hold high balances, particularly in the first half of the year following the busy and costly Christmas and New Year period. Many will also be accruing more debt on their cards over the Easter period as they take the kids away, spend money on entertaining or visiting relations, and keeping the kids busy over the holidays.

With all of this in mind it is not surprising that many people are looking for ways to try and reduce the amount of money that they will end up paying back on their credit cards, especially those that come with really high rates of interest. The good news is that the competition amongst credit card providers when it comes to balance transfer credit cards has been rising and this means that there are much better deals out there for those that have a pretty decent credit rating and are able to secure these deals.

In years gone by the interest free periods that were offered on balance transfer credit cards were often six to twelve months.

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Tags: Card, Credit Card