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Credit card agreements are typically something you’d want to read only if you suffered from insomnia. A glance at a few lines of the dense type, printed on filmy paper, is sure to help you drift off.

But buried in all that fine print are important provisions that affect you financially. So the federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is proposing a new, simplified form, to help make the agreements more readable and useful to card holders.

The bottom line is that many credit card agreements are confusing and most consumers don’t understand them, said Raj Date, the agencys temporary leader, in prepared remarks announcing the effort on Wednesday.

The prototype is short about 1,000 words, compared with roughly 5,000 for the average industry agreement and it does away with much of the legalese that is too dense for most consumers to digest. “Co

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A secured credit card may help you to save money while building your credit. Though there are numerous companies offering this type of deposit-based card, some cards have lower fees, credit reporting and better features.

A secured card requires the user to make a cash deposit to establish the account. This deposit is collateral for the lender. If you deposit $1000 on the card, for example, this gives you up to a $1000 credit limit. Some banks allow users to add to the deposit after establishing it to increase the credit line. Other lenders extend the credit line without requiring an additional deposit once you prove your creditworthiness.

Users can then use the card as they would a traditional credit card.

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I felt that the Halloween weekend called for something special and Cain Motters art came to the rescue. The Los Angeles-based artist has found an ingenious way of paying off his credit card debt. Hes created a hell of it.

Motter is creatively destroying the plastic symbols of his indebtedness by melting them into visions of what he thinks they really represent (see the slideshow below or a full-screen version here). Then he sells them for $1,200 apiece.

Here is how Motter explained to the BBC the story behind his art:

I started college in 1994 and they apparently sold students information to banks, so I received credit card applications in the mail.

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Since the 1970s, the federal government has implemented numerous acts of legislation designed to protect credit card users from fraudulent lending practices. The largest of these acts are the Consumer Credit Protection Act of 1969 (CCPA) and the Credit Card Accountability, Responsibility and Disclosure Act of 2009 (CARD Act). These acts regulate the information lenders must provide cardholders, the due dates for payments and the cardholder’s options if material changes are made in the terms of their contract.

The CCPA is a compilation of four other acts designed to protect credit card users. The first of these acts was actually created prior to the establishment of the CCPA.

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**Today’s guest post is contributed by a new-to-credit college student!**.

Credit card language is scary for the first-time cardholders like me.

Principal? Fixed Rate of Interest? Default rate? Oh my!

Yet these mysterious terms can be mastered and the average young person, like myself, can become a king or queen of credit! Or at the very least, new-to-credit consumers and college students need to be responsible users of credit.

Underneath the Plastic

At first, I didn’t see the difference between a debit card and credit card. I mean, it seemed that the same machine swipes either debit or credit in stores. But

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A few month ago, TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington ranted on TechCrunch about how his applications for an American Express credit card were repeatedly denied, despite his “good/excellent” credit rating of 748.

After the post was published and received hundreds of comments, Tweets, and a healthy helping of buzz, an American Express representative called Arrington and offered him a $15,000 credit limit on a brand new AmEx card. Here’s the full recap.

For the rest of us, no matter how much we rant, rave, and blog, we likely won’t be receiving a personal phone call from an issuer offering a credit card on a silver platter. But, wi

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