Do you give yourself free rein when it comes to holiday spending? Have you forgotten the founding fathers' stern visages because you charge everything to your credit card? With the U.S. economy showing signs of slowing and consumer spending skipping behind inflation, it's a good time to reevaluate spending habits and brace for some budgeting.

The holiday season is just around the corner and you should be creating a holiday spending plan now. This is often the time when the budget that has been working fine for people all year gets completely blown, resulting in a pile of debt for the new year. According to the National Retail Federation, people will spend $474.5 billion this holiday season, an increase of 4% over last year.

Because of episodes like this, discharged debts have attracted the attention of little-known firms expert at buying and selling a range of delinquent consumer obligations. Back-due bills with a face value of billions of dollars change hands at a steep discount every year. Five of the companies in this business are publicly traded on Nasdaq. Others have large private-money backers. B-Line, in Seattle, was acquired last year by the Dallas-based hedge fund firm Lone Star Funds. The investment bank Bear Stearns owns two bankruptcy-debt buyers: Max Recovery and eCast Settlement.

You can give yourself a respite by moving your balances to a card that charges 0% or another low introductory rate on balance transfers. To play this game, however, you have to keep tabs on the interest rate, your balance and the calendar. If the account isn't paid in full by the end of the introductory period, you may have to transfer your balance again to dodge an interest-rate spike.

A cash register isn't just a place where you pull out your wallet to get cash or a credit card anymore. At a growing number of stores, it is becoming a place of opportunity to put some of that money back, in the form of instant discounts, shopping perks and savings that may otherwise pass you by -- if you only sign up for the store's own credit card that the sales clerk is soft-selling you.

A congressional panel turned the spotlight on what has been called "unfair" practices of credit card issuers yesterday. This is part of a broader regulatory effort to crack down on credit card practices that are deemed unfair to customers. Here's how you can fight back against rising interest rate fees.

Based on the perceived value of what each card offers to the most people, plus the numbers of online visits to card offers, Capital One's Card Lab was ranked No. 1, according to IndexCreditCards.com, which researches and lists more than 1,200 online credit cards. Capital One's Card Lab allows consumers to pick and choose their own features such as interest rates and rewards or introductory rates on new purchases or balance transfers.

Three big credit dangers that can trip up your shopping BOSTON (MarketWatch) -- I got to spend a little time shopping the other day and what I noticed was that the gift-buying rush was just ramping up but the consumer credit mistakes were already rampant.

The National Retail Federation expects $475 billion in sales during the holiday period this year and, if you're like many shoppers, you'll be using credit cards for a chunk of that spending. So whatever your relationship with the plastic fantastic -- whether you're carrying hefty debt balances or are an occasional borrower or always pay your monthly bills in full -- you want to make sure the card you pull out of your wallet makes the most sense for you.

If you're among the legions of people who game a wallet full of credit cards for maximum rewards, card issuers are onto you -- and they're coming up with ways they hope will persuade you to stick with them. A bank wants you to use its card as your primary card -- known in the industry as getting to the top of a customer's wallet -- because the bank makes more money that way. That's what cash-back and other rewards were supposed to achieve. But cardholders quickly learned that they could maximize benefits by, for example, using one card at the grocery store and another at the gasoline pump, depending on which card earned the most rewards at a particular merchant.