Investing

Debit Card Overdraft Protection: How Many Customers Actually Opted In?

Bank customers used to be automatically enrolled in overdraft programs, which “protect” the customer by covering debit card expenses even if it exceeds the account balance. The fee for this protection—which only protects the customer from having his card rejected—is about $35 for each and every transaction. As of August 15, however, …

Why Bitch About Entirely Avoidable Fees?

Sure, ATM fees are ridiculous: You’re charged $3 for using an out-of-network machine, and then, adding insult to injury, your bank may hit you with another fee of $2 or more. The result is that you pay $5 for transactions that cost the banks a few pennies, if that, all to access your own money sitting in an account that probably …

Meet the ‘Cheapest Man Alive’

He owns a successful investment firm, employs 1,000 people, and is worth hundreds of millions of dollars. He also brings a homemade lunch to the office every day, had the office carpet repaired with duct tape, pays “only for the meat” and nothing else at holiday parties, and, after company meetings, gathers up paper clips so they can be reused.

7 Totally Dope, Awesomely Dorky Economics and Personal Finance Rap Videos

Plenty of rappers talk about money. But the lyricists in these videos really rap about money—not pimpin’ or drug deals, but international currency policy, bank bailouts, taxes, tithing, and other aspects of the gangsta economist lifestyle. They also make videos that feature Christians dancing like MC Hammer and the New Kids on the …

Q&A: ‘The Adventures of Unemployed Man’ Author Erich Origen

If you ever wanted to make sense of the bubble-riding, downsizing, outsourcing, debt-inducing, credit-crazy, middle-class-destroying era we’ve all just lived through—and in many ways, which we all continue to live in—a comic book will do the job as good as any. Hilarious, clever, very relevant, and remarkably insightful and …

Q&A: ‘Generation Earn’ Author Kimberly Palmer

To today’s young professionals, debilitating credit card and student loan debt and unemployment rates of 10% are common parts of their economic landscape, while ideas like job security and real estate investments that always rise in value seem like concepts of the distant past. How do people in their 20s and 30s differ from previous …

Bank Accounts: Do the Free Cash Come-ons Outweigh the Fees Sure to Follow?

Major banks are offering cash incentives—$100, $200, even up to $300—to entice would-be customers into opening new accounts. But just as the banks giveth, they’re also more apt to take away in the form of new and rising fees. Oh, and when you look closely at the fine print for many of these cash reward come-ons, the banks aren’t …

Study: No Reason to Pay Realtor Commissions When Selling a House

There’s an assumption that the 6% typically paid in realtor commissions on a home sale is worth it because the seller will command a higher price than if he’d gone the “for sale by owner” route. But a trio of academics who researched years of home sales says that this assumption is false. In fact, they discovered that owner sellers got …

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