Student loans are supposed to help middle-class kids pay for a college education, but these days they can do more harm than good. It's high time we did something about that.

If you imagine a world where the federal government and private...

When the Love Boat morphs into the Titanic and you are flailing in the icy waters of the North Atlantic, the banks are not rescuers, they're sharks. In other words, divorces can get messy -- sometimes really messy -- and it should come as no surprise that money is often...

Some call it the Student Loan Bubble -- I call it crazy. And what better time to discuss student debt insanity than now, as countless soon-to-be graduates prepare to slip on their caps and gowns?

An estimated 1.8 million students...

A Social Security number is like a skeleton key -- able to unlock a kingdom of untold riches for identity thieves. It is the central piece of data needed to hijack our credit, steal our health insurance, use us as human shields and generally wreak havoc in our lives. And...

Yes my friends, it's that time of year again. No, not allergy season -- graduation. That seminal moment in our lives when, in ceremonies of varying degrees of pomp and circumstance, our elders pass on the wisdom of the ages to those of us who are evolving from the shelter...

A sufficiently large minority of the U.S. Senate demonstrated their Orwellian allegiance to the gun lobby last week -- or their fear of it -- by blocking several commonsense measures that would have expanded background checks for gun buyers while imposing a ban on both assault-style rifles...

This just in from the "It Couldn't Possibly Get Any Worse" Department: The first wave of checks from the bungled foreclosure abuse settlement landed in mailboxes around the country this week, but when people tried to cash them, a number of them bounced. I don't know about you,...

The Bible tells us, "It is better to give than to receive." Most Americans don't feel that way on April 15. But when the Lord (a.k.a., an IRS algorithm) shines his countenance upon us and a portion of what we paid is returned in the form of a tax refund,...

Some credit mistakes are obvious. Everybody knows the big one: Failing to pay your bills on time. If you're looking to wreck your credit score, there's no faster way.

Some credit mistakes aren't so obvious. What's worse, the biggest secret credit mistake -- the one most people don't even...

Flanked by leaders from the credit industry and Congress, President Barack Obama announced today that he has signed an executive order designed to open up the consumer credit markets and give a boost to the still anemic American economy. For a three-month period, every American will get a perfect credit...

Every time you go to a new doctor or dentist and they give you a clipboard brimming with documents to fill out and sign, notice how they always ask for your Social Security number? Do you dutifully give it up? Did you ever wonder if they really need it?

I...

We commissioned a national poll last month which found that nearly 40 percent of Americans believe "identity theft is not a serious problem." In fact, they said they thought that it's "a marketing tool or scare tactic for companies selling credit monitoring or ID theft protection." When we saw these...

Veronica Gutierrez never asked Wells Fargo to act like her mother. The banking colossus just did it anyway. Here's what happened. She bought some sandwiches at Subway for $11.27. Then she purchased car parts at Autozone and went grocery shopping. Twelve transactions into the billing cycle, she wrote a check...

As a parent, I would never dream of handing my car keys to a teenager who hasn't first completed a driver's education class and spent significant time behind the wheel, ideally with me sitting (nervously) in the passenger seat. But every day, parents across America allow their children to obtain...

If you still believe identity theft is a marketing gimmick, it's time to take a look at the Federal Trade Commission report released this week. Identity theft is once again the top complaint in America, as it has been for 13 years. Identity theft complaints surged by 32...

This spring, the term "cyber war" turns 20. In his seminal 1993 paper "Cyberwar is Coming!" master military strategist John Arquilla envisioned an entirely new kind of battle.

That vision was articulated again, but as reality, in President Obama's State of the Union Address last week. The...

Right now more than 5 million Americans receive unemployment benefits. And right now, in many states a big chunk of those unemployment benefits are going straight to the bottom line profits of the nation's biggest banks because of junk fees tied to the prepaid cards used to distribute these funds...

We're coming up on three years since Mark Zuckerberg famously announced, "The age of privacy is over." Some of us, however, still value our privacy. The nonstop Facebook information grabs of late, coupled with recent high-profile security breaches, point to the inevitable: a catastrophic breach at Facebook. When that happens,...

If you think of your smartphone as just a phone, rather than a very powerful mini-computer that happens to make phone calls, you may be cruising for a world of pain.

That's because the amount of sensitive data many of us store on our phones is truly staggering. A smartphone...

I hate to say it, because I wasn't a fan, but this never would have happened under George W. Bush. There was a president who got what he wanted. "You don't like this war? Not only am I going to make it happen by hook or yellow-cake crook, I'm going...