I hear an ad for a new debt settlement company almost everyday. Frankly, most are pretty shady, and I would never recommend their services to someone looking for debt help. The last thing people in debt need is to give their hard-earned cash to someone else to "hopefully" make their problems go away. I mean, even if the company is legitimate, what does anyone learn from that? What's to stop the person from making the same mistakes again in the future?

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I've yet to actually meet someone who regularly uses Blippy.com, the twitter-esque social networking site that allows users to share their credit card transactions online.

Apparently there are still thousands of you, but I can't for the life of me figure out why. Where are you? Who are you? If you're out there reading this, please enlighten me!

Dear Creditnet: My fiancé and I are new to credit cards (we've only used debit cards in the past), and we're looking to get one that will give us hotel reward points. Any idea which card would help us better our credit scores while banking hotel points as well?

Dear Creditnet: The issuer of my primary credit card just sent me notice saying they're raising the rate on my existing balance to 30 percent. My account is already into the thousands and I can barely make payments as it is! I have been a little late in the past, for which I will now be massively penalized. Is there anything I can do? Any recourse?

I checked out FreeCreditReport.com today because I was interested to see what changes have been made in light of the new rules that take effect this week.

As you might recall, new regulations that were part of the CARD Act of 2009 require free credit report advertisers to clearly state that there's only one authorized place to get a truly free credit report—AnnualCreditReport.com. The deadline to make this change for online advertisers is April 2nd, while the same requirement for TV and radio ads doesn't take effect until September.