If you want an insight into the UK’s consumer debt mountain, you would do well to look at the from 6 February. The charity, which offers free debt advice over the phone, kept a tally of the number of calls it received, tweeting regular updates on this and the amount of debt reported, as well as occasional nuggets of information about individual calls.

By lunchtime it had received 452 calls to its helpine from people owing a total of £18m; by 8.00pm 1,475 calls had been received concerning £59.2m of personal debt. That’s an average of just over £40,000 per caller. Of course, the average disguises vast variations – while one caller reported a debt, including mortgage arrears, of £1.7m, another called about problems repaying £440.

As the day went on the CCCS mapped the calls, and the results showed a fairly wide spread in the location of callers, although there were hotspots in Arnold near Nottingham and Camberwell in London from where there were five calls each.

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he CCCS says the map was designed to show a typical day on the helpline. “The a Read more…

The fees charged to merchants for accepting credit card purchases may soon be limited in one state, which might be good news for consumers and small businesses alike.

New Hampshire lawmakers are currently considering a bill that would limit what banks can charge for processing credit card purchases to just 1 percent of a transactions value, according to a report from the Nashua Telegraph. Currently, merchants pay an average of about 1.75 percent of a purchase price but fees range anywhere from 0.67 percent to 4.76 percent, a price the merchant typically doesnt learn until after theyve been charged by banks.

This limit would be applied in addition to the new federal cap on debit swipe fees for major banks, the report said. Read more…

Everyone needs to pay taxes, but the problem is that no one has enough time to sit through and the entire process of calculating the amount of tax return and find out how much they have to pay. So what people do in such a scenario is rush to their CPA’s office to get their tax returns calculated. Now it is the accountant firms and the CPAs, which bear the brunt of all these accounting and calculating work. So an innovative and profitable option out of this problem for them is to go for tax return outsourcing. Well who would not like to undertake a business strategy like tax return outsourcing, which would be financially profitable and beneficial for his business?

Tax return is nothing but calculating the amount of money which an individual or a business will have to pay to the government as taxes annually. Anyone who has an ie is liable to pay taxes to the government or he can land in trouble. So having all your tax return calculated well in advance is surely going to help you out in being stress free as soon as possible. O

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The roll-out of new technology in McDonald’s in the UK has led to a surge in contactless payments for fast food, with a third of cardholders using the system to pay for food in the last three months of 2011. This compares to 12% the previous quarter, according to figures collated by Visa.

The contactless system allows customers to scan their credit card over a special terminal (like that used for Oyster on London Underground) to make payments up to £15. The aim is to reduce the time it takes to pay, shortening queues in popular retailers.

But although contactless payments have now been available in the UK for two years, and there are 17m cards and 75,000 terminals, Visa admits a low acceptance level by retailers is still preventing usage from becoming an every-day habit.

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While many consumers are working diligently to reduce debt and get their finances under control, one type of credit many consumers are adding in large quantities these days is student loan debt.

Student loan borrowing has increased for nearly every consumer age group, but none moreso than for those between the ages of 35 and 49, according to a report from Reuters. The credit tracking website Credit Karma recently found that the amount of student loan debt carried by those in this age group has risen 47 percent in the last three years.

“More and more people are going back to school,” Credit Karma CEO Kenneth Lin told the news service. “High unemployment, rising tuition costs, artificially low interest rates from the government, and increased for-profit school advertising… Read more…