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]
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Is renting a home the new American dream? A report by the Urban Institute projects that even after the housing crash and the Great Recession are a distant memory, homeownership rates in America will continue to decline. The report estimates that between 2010 and 2030, the majority (59%) of the [Keep reading]
The Federal Communications Commission sent a letter to PayPal on Thursday that was highly critical of the firm’s robocalling and robotexting fine print, which I first chronicled earlier this month. The letter says PayPal’s terms of service “raise serious concerns for the (FCC) enforcement bureau.” In a report for Credit.com last [Keep reading]
Like a teacher dealing with a procrastinating student, it is tempting after all the delays with the implementation of new chip-enabled credit cards to say, “That’s it, no more extensions!” And that’s what it sounds like when the financial industry criticizes merchants for requesting yet another extension for them to [Keep reading]
During the heyday of the housing bubble, mortgage sellers made a killing via kickbacks. They often got bonuses for steering borrowers toward more expensive mortgages. Financial reform, including a strict rule that took effect in 2011 from the Federal Reserve known as the “Compensation Rule,” banned the practice of giving [Keep reading]
Bob Sullivan