Personal Finance and Money Management

Hallelujah! My wife and I just finished paying off another student loan. Two down, and one more to go!

This past year, nearly seventy percent of undergraduates finished school with outstanding student loans.  In fact, the average student loan debt in 2010 totaled around $25,000 per person! If you take the average of 16-18 years to repay these loans, at the standard 6.8% interest rate of unsubsidized, Federal Stafford loans, that $25,000 would equate to over $40,000 in total payments! And don’t forget, these numbers only account for bachelor degrees; graduate school is often two or three times more expensive.

So what’s the best way to manage your student loans so you can quickly pay them off and move on with your life?  Her

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Ok, so what’s one of the first steps in planning an overseas trip, whether it be for business or pleasure? If you answered something along the lines of “booking a hotel” or “logging onto Priceline”, you’ve got it…wrong. In actuality, one of the first things you must figure out, after deciding where you want to go, is the logistics of spending money with overseas merchants. In doing so, you need to find the best exchange rate possible.

While your initial reaction might simply be to order some foreign coin at your bank or decide to grab some at one of those stands you see in the airport, your best bet is actually to apply for a no international fee credit card, according to a recent study by Card Hub. This study, w

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Direct mail industry sources report that credit card companies, after keeping a low profile for more than a year, are actively looking for new customers. Marketing campaigns by three major credit card issuers, Chase, Citi and American Express, surged from a mere 551 million offers in 2009 to an impressive 1.4 billion in 2010, according to the research firm Mintel Comperemedia. Another source, Synovate’s Mail Monitor, reports worldwide credit card solicitations at 2.73 billion, a 96% increase over 2009.

And the first quarter of 2011 is showing even more positive signs of resurgence in credit cards with an increase of more than 481 million household offers, representing a 29% increase over that in 2009, according to the Mail Monitor. L

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With thousands of credit card offers, it’s inevitable that some will be better than others. You needn’t worry too much if you have one of the “worst” cards on this list, however, because with this burden comes an easy opportunity for improvement. Simply

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