Check out the full post at The Daily Dish…

I’m not sure if we’ll figure out how to eliminate cash in our lifetime. After all, there’s still something very primal and fulfilling about carrying a wallet full of folding money. Plus, there’s always going to be demand for a system that leaves your transaction history totally secure. However, these four trends could streamline our everyday purchasing while preserving our security. Read more at Fox Business…

The folks at MSN highlighted a feature I originally wrote for CardRatings.com about the ingredients that make up your credit score. Each one of the four major credit bureaus uses their own recipe:

• FICO
• TransUnion
• Equifax
• Experian

Some bureaus give more weight to what you’ve done with your credit history over the past two years, while others look at everything from the past decade. Read the full article on MSN Money.

The folks at Fox Business have picked up some of my CardRatings.com columns for their Personal Finance channel. They’re featuring expanded editions of:

• Bank of America Tops Credit Card Safety Scorecard for Fifth Year
• Credit Card Spam Payments Handled by Just a Few Offshore Banks
• Best Credit Cards for a New College Grad

* The six best credit cards for parents. This ran as a Mother’s Day special, but it’s got some great ideas for Dads, too.
* The five best credit cards for recent college grads. New regulations make it tougher for students to get credit, but deals get better if you wait until graduation to open your own account.
* New credit card deals coming. Now that the delinquency rate on credit cards in the U.S. has dropped back to relative “normal,” investors have started pressuring banks to increase their personal lending portfolios. Expect some great balance transfer deals into the summer.

I love having a team like Curtis, Tim, and Amber, who keep challenging me to find great stories that help our readers save money. Check out what they’ve done with the archives to make it easier to find relevant articles.

I’m through the hardest part of the “remastering” process on the spinme.com books series, so I’ve been able to spend more time posting new essays to the site:

• “What’s culturally significant?“ I remember being part of a team that asked this question at WXPN in the late 1990s, and it crops up again today. When you can make a living with 1,000 true fans, what can you do to tip the scales into being culturally significant instead of merely self-sufficient? Part one, part two.
• How to offer your services as a producer… The mailbag offers a glimpse at a hobbypreneur who wants to find artists to record in his awesome project studio. Except the artists he finds aren’t so awesome.
• How Kickstarter could stifle success. I love the idea of pre-ordering new albums, but I agree that offering fans too much influence in the recording process could water down the work.

I’m getting some of my best ideas when responding to mailbag questions, so keep ‘em coming!

Partly, the series reflects the shift in spinme.com’s core audience: I’m not just seeing musicians looking for music marketing advice anymore. Many of the site’s readers are finding it after connecting with my Music Management for the Rest of Us book, craving more information about the skills necessary to develop artists careers.

The first two posts have gone live, and I expect there will be 60-70 finished pieces living under the “mmskills” tag by the time I’m through at the end of the season.