From California’s Office of the Attorney General we get the following tips to avoid being scammed.

DON’T pay up-front fees. Foreclosure consultants are prohibited by law from collecting money before services are performed.
DON’T ignore letters from your lender or loan servicer. Responding to those letters is your best bet for saving your house.
DON’T transfer title or [...]

Inventories are still high.

Low priced homes went higher in the bubble and have been crashing down faster.  The following is the Case-Shiller break down for L.A.  Lower priced homes are expected to hit their price bottoms sooner than the more expensive homes.  While low priced homes have around 9 month of inventory on the market [...]

While much of the economic attention has been at the federal level, the states are not all suffering equally.  California has been grabbing the healines, but it is not the only state suffering.
This graph shows the current unemployment by state (red segments) and the high and low unemployment rates since 1976 (blue bars).  This shows [...]

From Ron Griess of The Chart Store we get this wonderful graphic demonstrating just how abnormal historically the last 15 years have been.  Valuations are now the best they have been in over 15 years which means long term expected equity returns are also looking more favorable, but there is clearly room for more downside [...]

Healthcare reform has entered the limelight again this year and already people are trying to frame the problem as government versus marketplace solutions dividing along traditional liberal/conservative lines.  Unfortunately, this comes at the problem from the wrong direction.
From the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) Growth in Health Care Costs report we get the following graph.  The [...]

Gail Cunningham of the National Foundation for Credit Counseling provides the following information on FICO scores.

Paying your bills on time — 35 percent of your FICO score.
Ratio of credit available to credit used (using under 30% is good) — 30 percent.
Longevity of credit accounts (longer is good) — 15 percent.
Applications for new credit (fewer is good) [...]

Problem Moves to Prime Mortgages
To date foreclosures have been concentraded on the lower end of the housing market.  And the lower end could reach a price bottom by next year.  The upper end however is only just now starting to work through its problems.
In the chart on the right you can see that prime loan [...]

Herea are some provisions that take effect in February 2010

Must give 45 days notice before raising interest rates.
Must apply payments to the highest interest rate balance first.
Minors (i.e., under 21) must have a cosigner or prove they have sufficient income/assets.  Credit limit cannot be increased without cosigner approval.
Consumers will need to “opt in” to charge [...]

With the market up over 27% from its lows last Friday and lots of positive earnings surprises there is almost a viceral buzz building of people hoping it is a sign that we have hit bottom and things will start to get better.
From an economic standpoint this is almost certainly untrue.  While things are certainly [...]

 The March Employment Report is out. This graph from CalculatedRisk shows the job losses from the start of each employment recession of the last 60 years in percentage terms (as opposed to the number of jobs lost).
The trend shows that as we have moved away from a manufacturing dominated economy making  job losses less [...]