Family

The last time you were at your parents’ home, you discovered unpaid bills. They had forgotten to pay their gas bill for the past two months. You called the gas company and explained the situation, and then wrote out a check for the amount due, so everything turned out all right. But what if you hadn’t noticed the unpaid bills, and it was the middle of winter? Your parents’ heating could have been shut off.

The highly successful Cash for Clunkers program has run its course and run out of funds. The program will end Monday, August 24, 2009.

As of Thursday, August 20, 2009, over 457,000 dealer transactions had been linked to this popular program.

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Do you have duct tape holding your vehicle’s cassette deck to the dash? Does your odometer read 1,235 miles only because you’ve turned it over … twice? Do you wince every time you look at your gas gauge? Well, help is here in the form of a new bill signed into law June 24, officially known as H.R. 2346, the Consumer Assistance Recycle and Save Act of 2009 (CARS Act). Unofficially, the new legislation is known as Cash for Clunkers.

The basic idea here is that the government is offering a monetary incentive to trade in your old, inefficient vehicle (the clunker) for a new, more fuel-efficient model. In theory, this will help both the economy, by driving vehicle sales, and the environment, by taking gas guzzlers off the road and replacing them with more fuel-efficient vehicles.

306,000,000 … and counting. That’s 306 million people, the current population of the United States. The counting part will take place in 2010 with a massive undertaking known as the census, an official headcount of U.S. citizens that happens every ten years.

This counting means census workers are now out in neighborhoods all across the country collecting the preliminary information they’ll need to put together accurate population numbers. Unfortunately, it also means thieves will be out to exploit the situation, posing as official census workers, trying to collect personal information they can use for fraudulent purposes.

Well, it’s official. The credit card industry has been “sanitized” for the increased safety and benefit of U.S. consumers. The Credit Card Accountability, Responsibility, and Disclosure Act (otherwise known as the Credit CARD Act) of 2009 was signed by President Obama in May 2009, with most of the provisions taking effect in February 2010.

What does this slice of credit card reform mean to you? Let’s take a look at some of the changes that may affect you: