Welcome to the marriage penalty, gay couples! And the end of the health care benefit tax penalty, along with added Social Security benefits — at least in the 13 states where gay marriage wasn’t formerly legally recognized. While emotions overflow about today’s Supreme Court ruling, it’s easy to overlook the real-world [Keep reading]
UPDATED: Third party blamed for unauthorized access. Some Expedia.com customers are getting emails from the firm warning that a would-be criminal has obtained “unauthorized access … (to) your name, phone number, email address and travel booking.” The details are being used in an attempt to trick customers into sharing even more [Keep reading]
Co-signers for private student loans have had significant difficulty handing off the obligation to the primary borrower, despite what the lenders’ marketing materials say, according to a report issued Thursday by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Of those who applied for release from their co-signing agreement, 90% were rejected, the [Keep reading]
Can someone cash a check you’ve written more than once? Yes, thanks to the intersection of very old and very new banking technology. Impossible until recently – payees formerly were required to hand paper checks over to banks during a deposit – some experts predict “double presentment” will be the [Keep reading]
What is this? Learn about the Cynja comic series here
Buying a mattress fits somewhere in between buying a car and buying a home on the dreaded “babe in the woods” scale. As a big-ticket, infrequent purchase, consumers who go looking for a better night’s sleep find themselves navigating a hazy world full of intentional brand confusion and seemingly meaningless [Keep reading]
Among all the things that Washington D.C. has done in the past few decades, you’d be hard pressed to find anything more popular than the Do Not Call List. It had a rocky beginning — birthing took about a decade — but it worked remarkably well, as federal programs go, and [Keep reading]
First of all, if you haven’t read it, you must: The FBI is investigating baseball’s St. Louis Cardinals for hacking the Houston Astros, according to the New York Times. Someone from the Cardinals allegedly stole data offering insight into the Astros player evaluation files, details on possible trades, and so on. This [Keep reading]
Consumers hate passwords, and they are notoriously bad at choosing good ones. Today, the only alternative to being a memorization genius or re-using passwords is to use password management software that remembers all your well-crafted logins for you. It has risks, too — putting all those keys in one place [Keep reading]
It’s not just teenagers who’d rather look at their phones than talk to people. Bank account holders feel that way too, apparently. New research from Javelin Strategy & Research suggests that consumers now prefer mobile banking to in-person branch banking. Javelin’s survey found that 23% of consumers choose to use [Keep reading]
Bob Sullivan