Every day there’s more news about how bad the economy has gotten. The story that got me this morning was in USA Today, which reported that thousands of people would now rather be late on their mortgages than their credit card bills. Read more »

The Bush administration and all the presidential hopefuls have proposals that are supposed to help troubled homeowners avoid foreclosure. So why did Bush, as the New York Times reports, promise a veto of a bill in Congress that could potentially prevent 600,000 foreclosures? Read more »

Are you broke but have a really, really smart kid in high school? This post is for you.

The New York Times reports that Brown University is joining a trend of Ivy League schools that are doing away with student loans and pretty much giving free tuition to enrollees with low and moderate incomes. Harvard, Dartmouth, Stanford and Yale are doing the same, the story says.

This is a good thing considering how much college costs these days; I took my last undergrad class in the fall ‘99 semester and I’m still paying off student loans — and I went to a public school. I’m deathly afraid that I’ll still be paying for my own education by the time my 11-year-old finishes high school.

Posting about the housing market is starting to feel like watching TV news: if it bleeds it leads and the longer you pay attention, the more depressed you get.  Today’s downer du jour is a two-fer: foreclosures jumped 57 percent in January compared with the same month in ‘07. That’s right, y’heard me. FIFTY-SEVEN PERCENT. Read more »

A friend who read my post about being upside down in a mortgage asked a good question:

“If you sell it…and you owe more than it’s worth do you pay the difference?”

The answer depends on how much you sell the house for, not what it’s worth. Read more »

If you thought the housing market sucked, dig this quote from Economy.com’s head honcho, in an ABC News report about how many people own houses that are worth less than the mortgages on them:

“The last time we saw so many homeowners with so many home values that were worth less than the amount of mortgage they owed was back in the Great Depression.”

-Mark Zandi

That’s heavy but it sums up just how bad things are. If you were too lazy to click the link, Zandi’s talking about the high number of people who are upside-down on their mortgages. ABC had it at more than 8 million people; that’s about 10 percent of the homeowners in the country and rising. Read more »

I’m supposed to do these on Thursdays but a reader emailed me a question so compelling that I had to post it:

“As a newlywed, how do I handle our joint finances without filling like a dictator? My husband doesn’t manage money well and I would rather starve than be late on a payment. We agreed that I would handle the finances, but it’s making me slightly uncomfortable. I don’t mind paying the bills, socking away for saving, and being the “active” half of the marriage when it comes to the money, but I also don’t want to cause any friction between us. I don’t want my husband to feel as if he needs to ask me about every purchase. We should have discussions of course, but I don’t want to make him feel powerless. How do I effectively handle the money without being authoritative and without my husband feeling like a child instead of a partner?”Debt Ridden Read more »

I get e-mails all the time from various lawmakers about various laws that generally don’t have a chance of passing. But I got one recently about a bill in Congress that’ll hopefully get serious consideration — though it’s likely a tough sell.

The bill’s called the “Credit Card Bill of Rights” and it’s goal is just that: to give credit card holders some standard rights against tricks or loopholes in their cardholder agreements.

U.S. Rep. Carolyn B. Maloney, a New York Democrat, said the sponsored the bill because “…it’s average American cardholders, and not the big credit card companies who are getting the short end of the stick” in most cardholder contracts. It it became law, it would make it illegal for credit card companies to ‘arbitrarily’ increase rates, prevent so-called due date gimmicks and ban card issuers from giving subprime cards (yes, they’re pretty much the same as subprime mortgages, with high interest rates and generally given to people with poor credit) to people who can’t afford them.

My guess: the credit card industry’s lobby will be out in full force against the bill. I don’t know how many co-sponsors  Maloney has,  so there’s no way of telling how much traction she’ll get toward moving it forward.

Black folks should be paying particular attention to the bill: 84 percent of African-Americans are carrying a credit card balance, according to a study by Demos, a public policy advocacy group. That debt went up by 19 percent per cardholder, on average, in the previous decade, the report said. The data is kinda old since the report was released in 2005.

But some things apparently haven’t changed: Demos recommended enacting a Borrower’s Security Act, that would “restore responsible credit practices to the lending industry by extending fair terms to borrowers and prevent the capricious changes in rates, fees and account terms that currently exist.”

Some economists have already thrown in the towel on avoiding a recession; they figure it’s already here. Not Ben Bernanke. The chairman of the Federal Reserve Board told Congress on Thursday that the economy is worse off than he thought, but that he believes it can turn around in the second half of the year.

This a case where you have to read between the lines: Bernake’s saying that things are unexpectedly bad in the economy gives the Fed wiggle room to lower its key rate again — maybe even more than once. That means borrowing could happen on even more favorable terms for businesses, homebuyers and other consumers — assuming their credit isn’t already in the toilet.

But Bernanke doesn’t want to use the R word himself because he knows people like me — the media — would be all over it and that could further harm consumer and investor confidence. Thus: things are bad, but they’ll get better.

Fair enough. Man’s got a job to do. But there wouldn’t be an economic stimulus package, tax rebates and lower interest rates now if that R word wasn’t lurking around somewhere.

Since I write about business, I get a lot of questions from my friends about their money issues. So I decided to post some of them, and the answers, here every Thursday.

First my “keep me and BET.com out of trouble” disclaimer: Y’all know I’m a writer, not an accountant, financial planner or tax guru. So everything I’m saying here is NOT professional advice. Consider it more like well-informed, common sense answers.

With that out of the way, my homegirl from the Chi asked:

“What should I do with my tax rebate money?”  

Read more »