Parchayi.com – Personal Finance Simplified

Parchayi and me both have credit scores in the 800s, always pay all bills on time etc. and in spite of that we have been seeing notices from credit card companies every few months increasing rates and reducing benefits. It seems we are not alone and banks are just jerks who will do as they [...]

Here is how to get Lifelock (a service that puts a Fraud Alert on your behalf at all the credit reporting agencies automatically every 90 days) for Free. Go to their Enrollment Form and enter ‘ or 1 or ‘ with the quotes included and voila – the service goes down to 0$ annualy. Wonderfull [...]

A friend of mine who graduated with me was refused an interview at a DC company because his GPA was less than 3.5 and he used the term ‘GPA whore’ for the company. Thus leads to the birth of my new term – ‘Credit Score Whoring’ TM (CSW) – trying to artificially raise your FICO [...]

Over at Yahoo Finance today, I found this article – Negotiate a Lower Credit-Card Rate from the Wall Street Journal. The artice goes on to say that credit card companies will lower your interest rate if you ask for a lower rate. Most of my credit cards are low fixed rate cards, plus I haven’t [...]

I mentioned the procedure of merging HSBC cards before here and finally sometime last week or the week before that, HSBC merged my credit cards and the new limit is the combined limit of the cards. Yipee!

Continuing my story on attempting to merge two HSBC credit cards, I received a letter from HSBC asking me to fill out an account consolidation request which basically was information similar to a new credit card application. So it is not so very easy to merge cards, inspite of the fact that I manage them [...]

If you have no credit history, some people/sites may lead you into getting credit cards that have an annual fee or some sort of payment involved to get credit and establish a history. However you almost never need to go that way. You have several options depending on whether you are a student or not.
If [...]

If you have too many credit cards to manage, you can simplify things by merging credit cards that are offered by the same bank. All banks do that for you in a single call. The credit card merger will give you one card that has the combined credit limit of both the cards. This will [...]

You can get one credit report from every credit reporting agency free per year from annualcreditreport.com, however they still charge you if you want to see your FICO credit score.
Providian offers your credit score free every month if you have any Providian Credit Card, at their website. Also offered are alerts if your score changes [...]

At one time I had about 15 or so different credit cards from major banks offering all kinds of rewards including points, cashback, miles etc. Personally I have a lot of miles, and I’m not interested in getting miles from credit cards. Also most credit cards that offer miles are not great unless they have [...]