I’ve seen some secured credit cards that charge more than $200 in fees just for the first year! Obviously I can understand why they have to charge something, but $200? Are you kidding me?! Take a look at this Citi Secured MasterCard review to see how it compares to the others…

The Citi secured card application lists the annual fee as being $29. I don’t see mentions of any other fees besides that.

The application lists 18.24% for purchases, 25.24% for cash advances, and 29.99% for the penalty APR when it applies. Those were the interest rates as of Feb. 2011.

• You include a check or money order for an amount between $200 and $5,000 with your Citibank secured credit card application. That amount becomes your security deposit. You will be billed for your annual fee at a later time.
• Your security will be put into a Certificate of Deposit (CD). The credit limit on your Citi secured credit card will be up to the amount of money that’s in this CD.
• There is a grace period of at least 23 days after your credit card billing cycle closes. If you

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Revolving credit (which mainly comprises credit card debt) rose in December for the first time in more than two years, according to The Federal Reserve’s monthly analysis of consumer credit published Monday. Revolving credit increased 3.5 percent to $800.5 billion in December, up from $798.2 billion in November.

This jump will come as surprise to some analysts.

Polling consumers during the holidays, the National Retail Federation (NRF) found only 27.6 percent of respondents planned to use their credit cards during the festive period. The majority of consumers intended to use cash, debit cards, prepaid credit cards or some other payment medium, according to the NRF poll. In November, TransUnion, one of the big credit bureaus, published research finding that eight million Americans had stopped using credit cards altogether.

Credit card trends are complicated

For a long time now, commentators have been celebrating consistently falling total card balances, and congratulating American consumers on newly discovered prudence and financial responsibility. However, a few have pointed up that billions of dollars have been written off by credit card companies as uncollectible, and then passed to collection agencies. T Read more…

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Wells Fargo & Co. CFO Howard Atkins, whose sudden departure was announced this week, will leave with more than $22 million in pay and benefits.

Atkins will receive about $7.4 million in deferred compensation, about $900,000 in supplemental retirement contributions and pension benefits worth $940,000.

The figures were reported by Bloomberg News, citing executive pay researcher Equilar Inc.

He also holds $13.2 million in stock and options that vest after his retirement.

The bank — Colorado’s largest by deposits — announced this week that Atkins, 60, would go on immediate unpaid leave, and would retire at its conclusion on Aug. 6 for “personal reasons.”

Apart from saying that his departure was “unrelated to the company’s financial condition or financial reporting,” Wells Fargo has declined to elaborate.

In August, Atkins will have been at the bank 10 years. It was not clear whether some of his pay and benefits kick in at that threshhold, or if that is why his official retirement is being deferred to that date.

Wells Fargo & Co. CFO

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It has recently been announced that credit card rates have reached their highest in thirteen years, even though the base interest rate remains at its all time low of 0.5 percent, where it has been for nearly two years. Many borrowers may have thought that this would equate to more affordable borrowing on credit cards but the only purpose it has served is to widen the gap between the base rate and the average credit card borrowing rate.

There is now a massive gap of 18.4 percent between the base interest rate and the average credit card borrowing rate, which is going to put huge financial strain on many households who are already struggling with issues such as the VAT increase, job losses and pay freezes, higher living costs, and restricted borrowing conditions.

It was in 1998 when the average credit card rate was last this high, and at that time the base interest rate was higher, so the gap between the two was not as wide. There is around £52 billion outstanding on credit cards in Britain in total, and with interest added at a rate of 18.9 percent almost £10 billion a year extra is added to this. C

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Guggenheim Funds filed with U.S. regulators this week to market four international exchange-traded funds linked to BNY Mellon indexes.

According to Cinthia Murphy for Index Universe, the ETFs would join Guggenheim’s roster of 16 global equity funds.

It’s been a busy year for the provider. Guggenheim recently rolled out four of nine planned target maturity fixed-income funds. Although there are no tickers or expense ratios, there are other details:

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