Are you confronted with a possible short sale or foreclosure on your home? If so, you may be wondering how long it will take your FICO scores to FULLY recover after one of these bombshells hits your credit reports.
It’s a great question, and it happens to be one that we receive emails about every day. Well, now we have some hard data from FICO that finally helps clear up all the confusion around FICO scores, short sales, and foreclosures.
Check out this chart: Estimated Time for FICO Score to Fully Recover, which was released yesterday on one of FICO’s blogs.
Essentially, what FICO’s telling us is that if you have a good starting score (780), it will take your FICO score about 7 years to fully recover. In addition, there’s absolutely no difference in recovery time among short sales or foreclosures. The overall effect on credit scores is the same as well.
However, if your starting FICO score is lower, then your score should fully recover in a much shorter period of time. The est
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Credit Unions are Still a Great Bargain in the Anti-Bank Era 
Banks have a long way to go before they will restore consumer confidence and high customer satisfaction ratings. But traditional credit unions are still getting stellar reviews because they are affordable, customer-oriented, and offer a healthy variety of financial products including mortgages, credit cards, checking accounts, and auto loans.
Get a car loan with an interest rate of as little as 3.75 percent, for example, if you are a member of the Pacific Postal Credit Union. If you’re in the armed forces you and your immediate family members can get super rates on home equity loans through military credit unions, and if you work in any government agency there is a credit union ready to cater to your needs. But what most consumers don’t realize is that there are also credit unions all over the USA that allow anyone to join. You
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You can get 30,000 American Airlines miles by clicking on the link below or you can get 75,000 by calling the 800 number listed when you click Apply Now on our 75,000 AA miles offer.
Why stop at 75,000 AA Miles? Dont stop there. You can get a Capital One Venture Rewards Match My Miles card after you earn your 30,000 or 75,000 AA miles, and get matched on this huge sign up bonus, to the tune of 100,000 miles.
We called in and confirmed that this match applies to sign up bonuses as well as miles earned. Simply submit a statement with your application that proves how many miles you earned on your other airline card, and Capital One will match up to 100,000 miles, until they reach a total of 1 billion miles matched.
This means youll want to act fast the deal runs from Mid-March to Mid May, so if its still closer to Mid-March, we think your chances are good.
Beyond just the matching deal, this is an awesome credit card with a 2% rewards rate and no foreign transaction fee.
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All right, folks — you have less than a month to get those taxes filed! Each year, we all pray for refunds. Some of us choose to have our refund deposited directly into our bank accounts, while others select to have it sent to us by check. This year, 600,000 Americans will have the option to receive their refunds via prepaid MyAccountCard Visa debit cards from Green Dot, a leading issuer of prepaid cards. 
This is currently just a pilot program for moderate to low income earners, and you have to be invited to participate. These new cards are issued by Bonneville Bank, which the U.S. Treasury selected as its financial agent. Bonneville in turn partnered with Green Dot to manage the program. The government is trying to figure out whether American consumers will embrace this type of payment, and is also testing to see how much, if anything, people will pay for this option. Read more…
Dear Creditnet: My wife and I have excellent credit scores, but we used to only have one no annual fee credit card with a limit of $10,000 (balance is paid off each month).
I recently opened another credit card with better rewards and it has a $20,000 credit limit. I’ve been told not to close out our first credit card account, but should I lower the credit limit on it to somewhere around $500 since we won’t be using it?
Or will our credit scores be negatively affected by lowering our available credit limit from $30,000 to $20,500?
Answer: Thanks for your question, and congratulations on upgrading to a better rewards credit card!
Even though you don’t plan on using the old credit card much anymore, it would be best for your FICO scores to leave the account open with the same $10,000 credit limit. Don’t
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Thieves Steal New Credit Card Enabled Parking Meters 
Municipalities across the USA are switching over from old fashioned coin operated parking meters to new high-tech digital meters that accept coins or credit cards, and the trend has not gone unnoticed by thieves. They recently yanked about 20 of the new meters right out of the sidewalk in Chicago, leaving many people who had used their cards in the meters worried about the security of their credit card information.
A spokesman for the contractor who manages the meters for the city tried to assure everyone that their financial data was safe, saying that the card account information was stored and transmitted securely – and is not retained inside the parking meters.
The police department of Chicago was rather surprised that the thieves would work so hard to steal the meters because each of them weighs about 200 pounds. N
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— Cindy Williams @ 11:56 am — 
March 25, 2011