Poonkulali Thangavelu is a senior writer at Bankrate, addressing credit card-related consumer protection and debt management issues. She believes that making good financial decisions enables people to get more out of life and is happy to contribute to others’ financial education. She uses credit cards extensively and sees them as a good financial resource to draw on — if used wisely.
Poonka has extensive journalism experience covering personal finance and business topics. She draws on her financial education and expertise and likes to simplify the subject matter to enable readers to make good decisions. While covering the mortgage market for National Mortgage News, she curated and edited a newsletter targeting the home-equity lending niche of the mortgage industry. In this role, she cautioned that home prices were getting out of hand in the period leading up to the 2006 housing market crash.
She’s contributed to multiple business and consumer-oriented outlets, and her work has been picked up by various national publishers such as the San Francisco Gate, Chicago Tribune and McGraw Hill, along with syndication on Fidelity, MSN, Nasdaq, Yahoo! and others. Her career includes a stint doing consumer market research for global advertising agency Ogilvy as well as experience as an equity analyst and writer.
It’s great to earn credit card rewards, but don’t go overboard with your spending in order to hit a welcome bonus or bonus category cap. I like the Blue Cash Preferred® Card from American Express since it offers cash back on groceries, which I buy a few times each month anyway. The cash back rewards even offset the annual fee, so I find it worthwhile.
Making good financial decisions enables people to get more out of life, and I’m happy to contribute to that endeavor.
— Poonkulali Thangavelu
You are generally not responsible for your spouse’s credit card debt unless you are a co-signer for the card or it is a joint account. But some state laws vary and you may be liable for this debt.
Find out what a business credit card is and how this type of card works.
The Fair Credit Billing Act provides an actual timeframe for an issuer to resolve disputes.
Credit card interest rates have a high mark up over the prime rate. Why are card APRs so high?
The Fed held rates steady, but its decisions shouldn’t be your plan to get out of debt.
A card issuer will shut down a credit card account when the primary cardholder dies.
Credit card payment processing tends to pass in just a few days.
Interest paid on outstanding student loan debt, mortgage and home equity loan debt, business expenses, and interest on money borrowed to purchase investment property qualifies for a deduction.
