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•     Home address.
•     Valid checking account number.
•     Driver’s license.
•     Social Security number.
•     A couple of pay stubs to verify employment, wages and pay dates.

•     Young.
•     Has children.
•     High school graduate.
•     Does not own his or her home.
•     Relies on Social Security checks.
•     No access to any other type of credit.

•     Divide the finance charge by the amount of the loan.
•     Multiply that by 365 (number of days in a year).
•     Divide that by the term of the loan (typically 14 days).
•     Then move the decimal two places to the right and add the percent sign.

•     Cap interest rates at 36 percent.
•     Limit the amount of time each year a borrower could be indebted to a payday lender.
•     Expand access to affordable small-loan products.

You will find that many people today are living from paycheck to paycheck and running from payday loan provider to another. This article suggests three simple & quick ways to improve your personal finances.

Firstly, you might want to draw up a Cash flow statement for yourself. This is quite simple to do actually. Just take a blank sheet of paper and draw a line in the middle and consider how much money you are earning each month and list all the sources on the left and total it up at the bottom. Next on the right column figure out how much money you are spending each month, including how much interest and debt you need to repay. Take your credit card statements out and use it to work through this section. Once you figure this out, then you will be better able to manage your own finances or at least have a better idea about your spending habits.

Secondly, budget to save before you spend. This idea is taken from many millionaires who recommend that you use auto-transfer each month a sum of your money and either save it or invest it into some thing like real estate. My personal favourite idea is to take a sum of money each month and use it to purchase my favourite Exchange Traded Fund which works like a mutual fund only that it just buys up the entire index of stocks. This way you do not need to work about over performing or underperforming the market and the management fees for these funds are really low.

Finally, now that you know how much money you have left to spend each month, budget how much you want to spend each month. As terrible as it may seem, try to pay for things with cash and with a debt card so that you are kept in touch with how much you are actually spending. Its so easy to flash a credit card and then lose sense of reality and you only get hit with it at the end of the month when the bill arrives. So try to remind yourself constantly about the need to avoid spending exuberance.

In conclusion, doing a simple cash flow statement ever so often helps to keep yourself reminded of how your spending and investing patterns are each month. Budgeting to save before you spend will ensure that you will retire quite well off and budgeting before you spend will help you figure out how you want to use your available funds each month.

Remember that the more credit you use on consumer products which drop in value really fast, the most the credit card companies are going to make from you and the less you will have to spend in the longer term. Take control of your finances today and you will find your life starting to look brighter and happier.

Why, you may ask, is this necessary? Prepaid debit cards sound like a way to give your money to someone else before you spend it. From outside the perspective of the world of credit, yes, it does seem redundant. But take a look at this hypothetical situation, from the perspective of a consumer, and hopefully some light will be shed on the usefulness of prepaid debit cards.

Carl was living it up. He had a six-figure salary, a wife to make all other husbands jealous, a new Land Rover, and an upscale apartment. The thought of credit issues was laughable at this pristine moment in his life.

But something happened. Carl's luck began to turn. His beautiful wife, an amateur tennis fiend, was taking far too many lessons with her 25 year old Italian instructor, specifically at his private retreat where her cell phone curiously could not get reception. Carl's company hadn't made the mark for the quarter, and people at corporate were hunting heads. Carl's head, recently bald because of stress from the Mrs., must have stuck out, because he was the first one fired.

Then the divorce started, and while Carl was quite sure that he wasn't to blame for his wife's infidelity with someone half his age, she none the less made off with the car and apartment, and some serious alimony payments to come from Carl. Carl's credit score plummeted as he defaulted on his bills. He was left a broken, unemployed, bald man who could never watch tennis again.

When things leveled off years later, Carl wanted to rebuild his credit, though no credit card companies would accept him. He needed to find a way to transfer his cash into the world of credit, just so he could show that he'd make good on some payments.

As you can guess, Carl's answer is a prepaid debit card. He can show the bank that he's legitimate, in a way that only giving them cash can. The bank put credit on his card; Carl purchased Rogaine and a low-powered anti-depressant; and bingo, his credit began to return.

So, if you find yourself in such a situation, needing credit but inspiring no confidence from issuing companies, prepaid debit may be the way to go. Additionally, on a more serious note, pre-paid debit cards are increasingly used by those with relatively good credit as a method of controlling their spending. If there is not enough balance available for a charge, the charge will be denied. And there is no mandatory payment due at the end of the billing cycle.

Many consumers are aware that they can obtain a credit report, for a fee, from the three major credit reporting agencies. These include TransUnion, Experian and Equifax and they provide your credit report to loan officers, credit card companies, financial institutions and anyone whom you give permission to obtain a copy of your credit file. While many consumers know that credit reports can be obtained for a fee, many do not know that everyone is entitled to a free copy of their credit report from each of the 3 credit bureaus each year. Once every 12 months, you can visit http://www.AnnualCreditReport.com and gain instant online access to your free credit report.

When looking at a copy of your credit report, you will be able to view payment histories as submitted by each of your creditors, current and previous addresses along with any information included on public record. This may include civil judgments, bankruptcy or foreclosures, etc. If any of the information contained in your credit file is incorrect, you have the right to dispute that information directly with the credit bureau. At the time a dispute is submitted, the credit reporting agency will investigate and correct any errors that are made.

Additionally, if you are turned down for credit at any time, the creditor must provide you with a written reason for the decline. At that time, you may request a free copy of your credit report from the agency that provided the information to the creditor. By sending a copy of the denial letter to the credit reporting agency, they are then required to provide you with a copy of their entire file relating to you and your credit history.

It is recommended that consumers check their credit file every 6 months to ensure that information is accurate and to prevent or detect identity theft. If you notice an invalid address or credit line that you never applied for, this is an indication of possible identity theft and should be dealt with immediately by calling the credit bureau and having a fraud alert placed on your file. An informed consumer is a happy one.

A person who finds himself in this condition can use debt card consolidation to take out all his problems at once. The principle of credit card debt consolidation is similar to that offered by any creditor in case of multiple loan borrowings. The idea is to take all the accumulated payments that have to be made and then let a professional lender make it for us. What the borrower in this case needs to do is to take a loan and pay off that loan on agreed terms.

Reasons as to why any one should go in for credit card debt consolidation may vary from person to person but the primary reasons are :

• People generally find it easier to pay off one single creditor than to deal with different requirements of different creditors.

• Any sort of delay in payment of dues to the credit card banks would bring about hefty fines and sanctions for the credit card holders.
• A credit card holder can easily get loan at lower interest rates than the one paid out on credit cards.

These few benefits go a long way in helping the people who have credit card debts to meet.

After a borrower decides to take the Credit Card Debt Consolidation loans, it is imperative that the loan chosen should be the best and perfectly appropriate. In this regard the customer can choose between a secured credit card debt consolidation and an unsecured one. All depends on the need at that particular time. Other steps may include choosing between many lenders, taking advice from the counselors and using quotes to determine the best option. These steps help the borrower in getting the best loan available.

After all the thinking is done all is needed for a loan is an application for the loan and that can be made online or personally to a local lender to get a deal and start afresh with your credit cards.

Thus, on the average, American households possess 4 credit cards or a total of 13 payment cards including debt cards and store cards aside from credit cards. There are, actually, 1.3 billion payment cards in circulation in the United States.

But if you think that credit cards have made the lives of modern American consumers easier, think again.

Statistics show that the average credit card debt for each household per month is $4,800. This lead to 1.3 million credit card holders declaring bankruptcy in 2003.

And if you still consider yourself unaffected by this, then consider this one: upon retirement, most Americans can only expect to receive about 37% percent of their annual retirement income because of debt payment, leaving them to depend on the government, family and charity.

That's scary. So before you find yourself in the same situation, it might be time to evaluate your credit card debt.

One way of resolving debt that you might consider is credit card consolidation.

So what is credit card debt consolidation ?

In a nutshell, credit card consolidation is taking all your credit card debt dues and consolidating them into one monthly payment. This way, you don't have to worry about managing the payments individually. Aside from that, it may also provide you the additional benefits :

- Reduce interest payments

For several years now, one of the most sought after features on a credit card has been a long 0% balance transfer deal, almost to the exclusion of any other feature except maybe the headline interest rate of the card. More recently though, balance transfers have become less popular, not least because of the introduction of transfer handling fees, and there's now a new feature that more and more customers are considering to be of higher importance, namely cashback.


According to recent research, over a fifth of us now use a card that offers cashback or a rewards scheme, and the number has recently overtaken that of balance transfer users for the first time. So why has a seemingly simple feature such as cashback displaced the once mighty balance transfer deal in our priorities?

Credit cards have always suffered from the perception that they are expensive to use, with high interest charges and penalty fees

- a reputation, it has to be said, that isn't altogether undeserved. Cashback cards give us the opportunity to turn that on its head, and actually come out on top financially by using our cards for everyday purchases.
For every purchase you make, a cashback card will effectively give you a refund of a small percentage of the purchase price. In the early days of cashback, this percentage was so small it was hardly worth considering

- a 0.25% rebate was virtually worthless to most people with moderate spending habits. These days however, the figures are much more attractive, with a 3% rate not uncommon as an introductory offer. This kind of rebate is definitely worth having, and if you use your cashback card for all of your day to day shopping, the numbers can mount up surprisingly quickly.

What's more, if you use your card purely as a convenient payment method and not as a means of borrowing, and repay your full balance every month, then you'll avoid paying any interest fees or charges. This means that the money you 'earn' through cashback is totally free money

 - you're being paid simply to buy your usual shopping with a card rather than with cash.

Sounds good ? Well, it's not hard to see why this kind of card has increased in popularity, but there are a couple of points to think about before applying for an account.

The main problem is that most of the time, you'll only receive your cashback once a year, either by check or refund to your account. This is fine for most people, but the cashback offer will be dependent on you sticking to the credit agreement. If, even accidentally, you make a late payment then you'll have broken the terms of your agreement and will lose all the rebate you've been building up. Keeping up to date with your repayments is therefore even more essential than normal with a cashback card.

Secondly, many cards feature a 'spending limit' over which no cashback will be earned. Most such limits are fairly generous, but check to make sure your expected annual spending on the card is within this limit if you want to maximise how much total rebate you can get.

So, are cashback cards the future ? If you're a regular spender who can clear your balance in full every month, then they are very worthwhile indeed, but if you're planning to carry a balance then you might be better served by getting a card with a lower standard rate and no cashback or rewards feature.

In the Unites States nowadays, attending colleges or universities is not really possible without the assistance of student loans. For those students who are not eligible to receive federal government financial aid to support their fees for higher education, private student loans are always the easy solutions.

 After obtaining the loan, the next worry comes. How can the students repay their study loans during economy crisis? The solution is consolidating their private loans to ease the financial burden.

Let's learn more about this consolidation program.

• First of all, you must be clear that there are many types of private student loan consolidation programs offered by the lending institutions with different interest rates as well as variable application requirements. You need to be diligent in doing detailed researches to find out as many options as possible in the market.

• The approval for this private loan consolidation program is based on the credit score of the applicants. The lenders usually fix it as a key requirement. As a result, when you are applying for this type of program, please get yourself ready with your credit report. You can request for a free credit report from one of the consumer reporting companies such as Experian, TransUnion, Equifaxor, etc. You can also get it on complimentary basis from the official website of AnnualCreditReport.com. Bear in mind, if your credit score is unsatisfied, a cosigner is definitely required.

• To some of the students, it may be hard for them to search for reliable private loan consolidation institutions. There are two well known ones, i.e. City Student Loans and Wells Fargo Private Consolidation Loan.

• In general, the interest rates of these private programs are usually slightly higher than federal loan consolidation rates. As a result, when you are consolidating your private loans, don't compare the interest rate with federal ones.

By: J.J. Yong

  If you are currently experiencing problems making repayment of your credit card debt, then the time has come to consider switching your credit card account to a 0% account.