Personal Finance News

I'm a Mac ... and I'm conflicted. For the past 15 years, I've barely placed my finger on a PC, either at work or at home. I've spent most of my career as a magazine editor, a profession that relies almost exclusively on Macs as its primary tool, and over time, Apple's platform has necessarily been hardwired into my brain. But over the past year, as more consumers snap up iPhones and collect endlessly clever apps, my personal relationship with this company has begun to feel abusive.Today, the rest of the world is salivating over the next-gen iPhone, which goes on sale this month. And me? I'm seething over my two-year-old MacBook's third trip since August to the emergency room.

Ah, Sunday morning! It's nearly upon us again. The languid wake-up. The mocha java. The nova and cream cheese. The tangy mimosa. The New York Times. The New York Times Magazine. The New York Times Magazine's Money Issue. The glance at the table of contents. The flipping ahead. The credit and credit cards. The ballooning debt. The inevitable bankruptcy. The creeping dread. The moist paranoia. The undulating queasiness. The pushing the bagel aside. The not finishing the mimosa. The crawling back into bed. The curling into fetal position. The whimpering and weeping. The desperate wishing that it were All a Bad Dream. Ah, Sunday morning!

If you're a Times reader, get ready for a page-turning, stomach-churning weekend. The Money Issue -- given everything, the editors might as well have called it the Credit Issue -- taps into our nightmares of financial nuclear winter, on a wide level and a personal one too. The paper's economics reporter Edmund L. Andrews provides a personal tale of his experience of buying a house outside Washington, in Silver Spring, Maryland. He was supposed to know better, he says -- he was, after all, reporting on the subprime mortgage crisis -- and yet he jumped in anyway, enchanted by the lure of easy homeownership and easier money. (Andrews' article, tellingly, excerpts his forthcoming memoir, Busted: Life Inside the Great Mortgage Meltdown.)

Imaginary transcript from NBC's "Weekend Update," Season 1, Episode 1:

Announcer: From Studio 8H in Rockefeller Center, it's "Weekend Update," with Team WalletPop!

[Cheers and applause]

Hello, we're WalletPop, and here's tonight's top story:

The New York Times reports that NBC will spin off Saturday Night Live's "Weekend Update" segment, hosted by SNL head writer Seth Meyers, into as many as 13 half-hour prime-time specials in the fall.

[Applause]

NBC's move comes in a heated season of rivalry among the big four networks and pre-empts Fox's anticipated announcement this week that it will hire Billy Mays to host a series of one-hour Slanket infomercials.

[Cheers, applause]

President Obama made good on a campaign pledge for credit-card reform on Thursday when he sat down with execs from issuers to demand a halt to an epidemic of increasing fees, interest rates, and red tape.

The New York Times (among other publications) reports that Obama envisions a compromise preserving both the credit-card market and consumer sanity. A bill protecting consumers passed the House Financial Services Committee Wednesday, designed to limit steep fees and penalties and prohibit the marketing of cards to minors. The bill may go to the House next week.

A credit-cardholders' rights bill in the Senate Banking Committee doesn't have the same guarantee of swift passage. Among the bill's features, outlined in detail on Wednesday by Credit Karma, would be a ban on hikes in interest rates without legitimate cause and 45 days' notice. Credit-card executives and lobbyists argue that the Federal Reserve's restrictions, set to take effect in July 2010, make further restrictions unnecessary.

Maureen Dowd, the most widely quoted newspaper columnist in America (or at least in Georgetown's cocktail-party circuit), works herself into a lather this morning, right on the pages of The New York Times. She just doesn't get Twitter. And because she doesn't get Twitter, apparently nobody else should either, and founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone deserve a spanking. But her interview with "EVAN" and "BIZ" reveals that Dowd has truly met her match. She doesn't like that. And who can blame her?

Dowd has never really been one for nuance. She's not a cold-eyed analyst but a smartypants wordsmith, given to inane, clever-clever phrasings and rhyming themes suitable for snappy ad copy. The words "cutesy" and "coquettish" come to mind, but those descriptions overlook her obvious intellect. Dowd is an excellent reporter by trade, yet her position on the Times Op-Ed page invites her to try her hand at writing late-night monologue wisecracks. She's the furthest thing from an airhead but she plays one in the Times today. And she gets schooled.

eThere are probably people out there who lie awake at night, thinking about credit cards. They toss, imagining their tenacious debt entangling them like ivy slowly choking a brick house. They turn, fantasizing about the C.I.A.-approved techniques they'd like to see performed on the leaders of the credit-card companies. For people like that, next Thursday, April 23, is a day they're going to want to circle on their calendar. And it's not because it's the day their minimum payment is due.

In fact, it's the day that 14 of the nation's largest credit-card companies might be sending their executives to the slaughter -- or to a meeting with Obama Administration officials, which is pretty much the same thing. The Washington Post predicts the meeting will happen, and the prospect promises a fast and furious fireworks display, given the climate. If there's one lesson this fledgling White House has learned in its first hundred days, it's that it can't go broke with displays of outrage that companies like to clean out the wallets of ordinary folks. Suddenly, that's no longer acceptable.

Ah, spring! When a young consumer's fancy turns to McMansions and Honda hybrids! Or, in this nasty climate, perhaps another stroll through the storied halls of your favorite institution of higher learning. (It may be April, but the economic forecast is still stuck in "wintry mix." Might as well sit on the sidelines and get a law degree.) Getting a mortgage or a loan still isn't a walk in the park, but it might feel like one if you were trying to get a loan six months ago, when A.I.G. and Lehman Brothers were in full meltdown, and the credit markets had seized up like a cramped swimmer.

Well, these days, despair might be ratcheted back to third gear. The New York Times today serves up cautious optimism for a "spring awakening" in the credit markets that reflects the national bailout blueprints and mirrors last week's Wall Street upswing.

"The revival is tentative and, like the gains in the stock market, which pulled back on Monday, it may well prove fleeting," warns the reporter Jack Healy. Still, after months of relentless despair, it's hard not to breathe a little sigh. The credit markets are more stable, interest rates for mortgages are at historic lows, and achieving your dreams is going to be a little easier.

Today we've learned of yet another unhappy achievement for credit-card issuers, no thanks to Reuters and USA Today. (Not that we're blaming the messenger.) Credit-card charge-offs reached their 20-year peak in February, at a dizzying 8.82%, according to Moody's Credit Card Index. That's a rate of uncollectible debt a full 3% higher than it was a year earlier.

For cardholders who can't pay off the debts they've racked up, maybe it's comforting to see more Americans trapped in the same downpour with a leaky umbrella. But as the banks continue to dismiss more of their cardholders' debts as uncollectible, our already troubled economy -- ever reliant on our collective consumption -- remains stuck in its queasy spiral.

If committing your day to 4,800 words about income taxes isn't your idea of fun, do yourself a favor and sit down with Jason Zengerle's "Hell Nay, We Won't Pay!" from Sunday's New York Times Magazine. Think I'm kidding? Here's the story's lead: "On Monday, April 16, 1990, millions of Americans sent their tax returns to the Internal Revenue Service. Peter Hendrickson sent a bomb."

Just in time for Tax Day, the article exhaustively documents America's restive tax-protest movement -- if such a Balkanized, ragtag crew can be called a movement. Every year, when it isn't fielding bombs from its constituents, the I.R.S. receives as many as 100,000 tax returns it considers frivolous, which bureaucrats place in what they call "the funny box." You don't have to be frivolous to be labeled as such, according to Zengerle (who, in full disclosure, is a friend of mine). Any tax rebel who files a so-called "educated return" after learning, erroneously, that income taxes are unconstitutional, or that only income earned outside the U.S. is taxable, usually winds up having to defend his or her actions in court. And not surprisingly, the court always seems to win.

Ask not what your bank can do for you; ask what your bank can do for your country's sullen consumers.

Next week, when Bank of America Corp. takes over the Upromise credit card from Citigroup Inc., it plans to eliminate a $300 annual limit on cash-back loyalty-rewards bonuses that Citigroup had imposed.

WSJ.com blog The Wallet reports on the Upromise promise. Until now, customers who spent $30,000 a year on the card maxed out their 1% annual cash-back limit. No longer.

Upromise is designed to help parents save for their kids' college. But beyond its educational goals, is the Upromise move an act of patriotism? After all, President Obama is pleading with increasingly nervous (and increasingly unemployed) Americans to please, please part with just a little loose change. The card's cash-back savings can be funneled straight into a Upromise-managed 529.

While spending $30,000 on a Upromise card isn't quite enough to buy a year's tuition at Harvard, it's enough to put you in Benjamins sufficient to acquire the stuff of your dreams (base price, 16GB 3G version). Spend 'em if you got 'em.