The Salvation Army’s Red Kettle Campaign will be more than a drop in the bucket this year. Two hand-held credit-card machines will take donations from people who aren’t carrying cash. “We’re trying to stay with the times,“ Salvation Army spokesman Jeff Baldwin said yesterday during a trial run at the Ukrop’s store on Forest Hill Avenue.

Freshmen can avoid money woes College freshmen, listen up. Get your financial life on track this first semester—or you may wind up making mistakes and paying a heavy price later, warned R.D. Norton, author of “Start Here: Getting Your Financial Life on Track.“ Living away from home with your peers is awesome, isn’t it? But, as a freshman, “there are plenty of things that can get you into trouble,“ Norton said in an interview.

Shopping for a credit card is a lot more complicated than it used to be. That might be a hard pill to swallow if your terms were unfavorably tweaked in the past year and you’re itching to take your business elsewhere. You may find other banks aren’t clamoring to steal you away. If you don’t believe it, just check your mail. This year, the number of credit-card offers sent to households is forecast to sink 60 percent to 1.5 billion, after falling 71 percent last year, according to market research firm Synovate.

Parents, talk to your college-bound youngsters about the correct use of a credit card on campus this semester—and about the dangers of racking up debt. Think about these sobering facts from a 2009 study by student lender Sallie Mae: Undergraduates are carrying record high credit-card balances. The average balance has grown to $3,173, the highest in the study’s history.

They used to tell you “don’t leave home” without your credit card. These days, more helpful advice might be this: “Don’t leave home planning to use your card without checking the credit limit first.“ Banks have slashed credit limits for tens of millions of cardholders since early last year, and data indicate that most of the cuts hit people who had no late payments or other negative marks on their credit histories.

Two new rules meant to give credit-card users more information and stop policies that many consider abusive go into effect today. The mandatory provisions are part of the Credit CARD Act—as in “credit-card accountability, responsibility, and disclosure.“ The bulk of the rules won’t kick in until February. Here are some questions and answers about the new regulations:

This week’s indictment of a hacker believed responsible for the biggest retail-store data breaches in U.S. history doesn’t necessarily make shoppers safer from having their credit-card numbers plundered. Accomplices to the crimes are believed to be on the loose in Russia or other countries where U.S. authorities are less likely to get them. And the underlying security holes mined by the hackers still exist in many payment networks.

Debit-card use was growing rapidly before the economy tanked, but the recession appears to have made them the preferred form of plastic. Both in terms of the number of transactions and the total dollar amount spent, debit cards have overtaken credit cards for U.S. consumers. In dollar terms, debit cards are now used for 50.4 percent of all noncash sales, though they have a lower average dollar amount per transaction, according to research from TowerGroup, a subsidiary of MasterCard Worldwide.

American Express and Discover customers soon will be free of fees for charging over their credit limits. The two companies said separately that they will end the charges, which have generated widespread criticism from consumers. The moves come before credit-card regulations set to take effect in February limit the way card issuers can charge such fees.

Outlook for the credit-card industry as government reforms take shape? Uncertain. Just 77 days after President Barack Obama signed the Credit Card Accountability Responsibility and Disclosure Act of 2009, and six months before it will take effect, credit-card issuers are scrambling.

Who wins and who loses after credit-card reform? Credit-card issuers that will suffer the most are those that relied heavily on penalty fees and jacked-up interest rates and have a lot of high-risk subprime customers. That’s the assessment of Morningstar analysts Michael Kon and Matthew Warren. They cite Bank of America and Citigroup Inc. as among those firms. Capital One, with some sub-prime customers, will also be affected, Warren said.

Before the reforms kick in, some issuers are:
increasing card interest rates;
raising fees;
switching fixed cards to variable ones;
lowering card limits;
increasing monthly minimum-payment amounts;
decreasing grace periods; and
targeting good-paying customers for rate increases.
After the reforms are in place, some issuers are expected to:

Consumers paid down their credit cards and cut other debt in June for the fifth straight month as they rebuild savings battered by the recession. Outstanding U.S. consumer debt fell by $10.3 billion, or 4.9 percent at an annual rate, to $2.5 trillion, the Federal Reserve said yesterday. That’s a much steeper cut than the $4.7 billion analysts expected, according to Thomson Reuters.

It could be time to kiss fixed-rate credit cards goodbye. Two of the biggest credit-card issuers in the nation—Bank of America and Chase—say they’re switching some fixed-rate cards to variable rates to manage costs in light of the sweeping new reforms to the credit-card industry. The interest on variable-rate cards is tied to the rise and fall of the prime rate. The current prime rate is around 3.25 percent.

Riding a wave of public outrage over credit-card practices, 7-Eleven Inc. wants to show merchants are victims of the industry, too. The convenience store chain announced a petition this week to give small businesses more power to negotiate the fees they must pay whenever a customer uses a credit or debit card. 7-Eleven said more than 6,000 of its franchisees plan to collect 1 million customer signatures to deliver to Congress this fall.