Are you looking for ways to eliminate your personal credit card debt level? If you’ve started defaulting on the multiple credit card accounts and you feel that your monthly income is not enough to repay the total debt amount, you should look for professional help. Before knocking at the doors of the shady debt consolidation and debt settlement companies, you should initially get help from a credit counseling agency. These are teaching organizations that gives you enough advice that will be helpful in closing the doors on credit card debt.  Check out some benefits of credit counseling agencies.

• He’ll assess your present financial state: The first task that they’ll do is to assess your present financial state. You have to show them the total amount of debt that you owe, the names of the creditors, the total outstanding balance and the interest rates on each account. Unless

Full article…

• 0 Comments

Just as it was recovering (sort of) from its PR nightmare, BP decided to slash rewards on its branded credit card, the BP Visa. The card, once considered among the best gas cards available, is now mediocre-bordering-on-sucks. Originally, it gave 5% back on BP gas, plus 2% on travel and dining and 1% elsewhere. The best part? It gave double rewards – that’s 10%, 4% and 2% for the first 60 days. Now, well, not so much. Its a veritable minefield of terms and conditions gotchas, and for all its nice looks, its a disaster of a rewards program (too soon?).

How far the mighty have fallen

Unwilling to have even one good thing associated with their brand, even if it’s just a credit card, BP sent out a mailer to cardholders announcing a change to its rewards structure. Effec

Full article…

• 0 Comments

It slipped by me at the time, but Constellation Software took itself off the market two weeks ago, having announced last April that it was considering strategic alternatives. With two large shareholders in OMERS and Birch Hill Equity Partners , most assumed that a sale would come to pass last summer.

At the time of the for sale press release, with the stock at $65/share, the market cap was around $1.385 billion; before any takeover premium. Thats a hefty MA bite for most software or service firms, leaving only big players such as INFOR as viable bidders. Im sure that Merrill and BMO did a good job on the sell-side, but with a tough debt market limiting PE options and an apparently unwilling management team, the outcome might not have been much of a surprise. At least with the benefit of hindsight. Just because it has been a great investment post-IPO doesnt guarantee a successful sale transaction, unusual as that is to say.

Now that the stock is over $84, thanks in part to a new 5% dividend that pushed the quote up despite being pulled off the market, perhaps theres still a deal to be done at CSU.

Full article…

• 0 Comments

With bank lending slowing and capital markets closed to all but large corporates, small and medium-size enterprises around the world are in desperate need of new sources of funding. Given how important SMEs are to the global economy, the credit crunch they are experiencing is more than one sector’s plight. Should financing continue to tighten, it could have a huge impact for SMEs themselves, for economic recovery and growth, and for the stability of global corporate supply chains.

A number of new investors and new funding avenues are beginning to take up the slack—from private placements to asset-based lending and from retail investors to dedicated SME investment funds. But whether these alternative financing channels can kick-start SME growth remains to be seen.

SMEs are well-recognized as the foundation for economic growth: Mom and Pop firms in the US and family-run Mittelstand companies in Germany both account for around 50% of their national GDP. The well

Full article…

• 0 Comments