
Can a merchant store my credit card details without permission?
Discover how security standards protect your card details with merchants.
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
Discover how security standards protect your card details with merchants.
Returned card payments can bring on a variety of fees and may harm your credit.
Find out how your credit history reveals your creditworthiness to lenders.
Credit card issuers must provide an explanation for denying your billing error dispute.
Learn how to remove your card information from an online site.
As a victim of credit card fraud, you have protections under the Fair Credit Billing Act.
What happens to your credit card account if the bank issuing it shuts down?
Giving card info to a trusted app is generally secure but still comes with risk.