It is highly likely that you have recently received a new, updated credit card from at least one of your credit card vendors. If you did, it is almost certainly one of the new “chip-enabled cards.” You most likely are wondering “What is this all about?”

The United States is very late to the game in the chip card market. These have been in use in Europe for a number of years. It is all about security. After the cards were introduced in Europe, there was a sharp decline in credit card fraud. Without getting into too much technical detail, the old magnetic strip cards allowed the retailer to store card data in their systems, making them ripe for data theft. The chip cards, referred to as EMV (Europay, Mastercard, Visa) utilize a process referred to as tokenization to increase security. In lieu of recording the credit card number a one-time “token” number is substituted in the Read More

This email popped up from the Credit Card Insider team just as I was having a conversation about summer jobs with my 19 year old. They asked me if I would be interested in writing a post about advising college students/fresh graduates about credit cards and good practice.

Now, both my teens will tell you that I absolutely love advising, only, they don’t seem to agree on the term used, I think they would rather call it “lecturing” and immediately turn their ears off. (How is that humanly possible, anyway?) Naturally, I immediately shot back an answer to the email, “Serendipitous!” I said, “I would love to.”

If you are a recent college graduate and are trying to stare down a humongous college Read More