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Haggling – it is not a very romantic word,  it actually gives me a tense feeling as I envision the meaning of the word. How about “effective negotiation”? There, I like that better. But what really is haggling, and how can an individual use it to their advantage?

A recent article in the Washington Post discusses what is deemed to be a hot new trend - haggling for reduced prices for goods and services. According to Nancy Koehn, a Harvard Business School retail historian, the recession has forced people to become more assertive, and the increase in haggling is “the biggest sea change of consumer behavior since the end of the Second World War”.

But wait a minute, I’ve been “haggling” with street vendors and the locals down on the Mexican beaches for years in order to get $5 toe rings and ten tamales for a dollar! Apparently times have change

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This past Thursday the Federal Reserve board raised the discount rate one quarter percent to 0.75 percent. The discount rate is the rate banks pay for emergency loans. A higher discount rate doesn’t mean we will see higher CD rates, savings account rates and mortgage rates.

The change is part of the Fed’s action to normalize the Fed’s lending facilities. Now that the financial crisis is over and things are getting back to normal the Fed is pulling back the extraordinary liquidity it provided to get us through financial crisis.

The Fed also said the action won’t lead to tighter financial conditions for households and businesses and doesn’t signal any change in the outlook for the economy or monetary policy. The action won

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Thinking of taking advantage of a balance transfer credit card offer you received in the mail? You might want to wait until after February 22, 2010 to do a balance transfer.

The reason being, after February 22, credit card companies have to apply any extra principal paid to the credit card balance with the highest credit card rate. 

Here is an example: You have a credit card balance of $10,000. For

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Bad credit car loan applicants should check their credit reports first as they can raise their FICO scores by disputing the errors they find and having that same information corrected on their credit reports.

Boosting your credit score

At Auto Credit Express, we are in the business of working with our applicants to help reestablish their car credit and improve their FICO scores by financing either a new or a newer pre-owned vehicle with a bad credit car loan through high risk lenders.

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For so many of us, paying the monthly bills can feel like a game of tug of war. Allocating money to one bill means there’s not enough to put toward another. So which is more important: your credit card or your mortgage? More people are answering that their credit card bill is higher on the priority list than their mortgage. A recent TransUnion study shows that the percentage of people current on their credit cards but delinquent on their mortgages is 6.6%. The percentage of people who are current on their mortgages but delinquent on their credit cards is 3.6%. 

What have the credit card companies done to us?

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