What could be the harm in sharing my American Express statements online?
"American Express is great for this use case -- they have two user roles ""Account Agent"" and ""Account Manager"" which allow you to designate logins to review your account details or act on your behalf to pay bills or request service. This scheme is designed for exactly what you are doing and offers you more security and less hassle. More details here." "If someone gains access to these data, he could use social engineering approach to impersonate you - i.e. call the American Express and ask tell he he is you and he lost the access to the account and he needs the access to be reset and sent to certain email, and if they doubt it's you he would send them the statement data, even on company letterhead (which he would be able to fake since he has the data from the statements, and AE has no idea how the authentic letterhead looks like). He could also do the opposite trick - like calling your assistant or even yourself and saying something like ""I'm from American Express, calling about the transaction at this-and-this date and this-and-this time, this amount, please confirm you are {your name} and your address is {your address}, I need to confirm something"" - which would make it appear as he is really from AE since he knows all these details - and then ask you some detail he's missing ""for security"" - like your birth date or last digits of SSID or anything like that - and then use these details to impersonate you to AE.  So putting all this info together where it can be accessed by strangers does have risks. It may not work out if both you and AE personnel are vigilant and follow instructions to the letter, but we know it not always so." Call me overly paranoid, but letting unknown people know your charges and your personal information is asking for trouble. They know who you are and how to find you and how much money you typically make. If they are decent people - okay, but otherwise they have good ground for comitting a crime against you - blackmail you, con you, target thieves on you, steal your identity, anything else which you won't like if it happens. And it has noting to do with being from Philippines - disonest people are everywhere. Crimes happen all the time, just the less you expose yourself the less likely a crime will be committed against you. My suggestion would be to share as little financial and personal data as possible, especially to share as little actual money figures as possible. Also see this question. "As a person who has had several part time assistants in the past I will offer you a simple piece of advise that should apply regardless of what country the assistant is located. If you have an assistant, personal or business, virtual or otherwise, and you don't trust that person with this type of information, get a different assistant.  An assistant is someone who is supposed to make your life easier by off loading work. Modifying your records before sending them every month sounds like you are creating more work for yourself not less. Either take the leap of faith to trust your assistant or go somewhere else.  An assistant that you feel you have to edit crucial information from is less than useful. That being said, there is no fundamental reason to believe that an operation in the Philippines or anywhere else is any more or less trustworthy than an operation in your native country. However, what is at issue is the legal framework around your relationship and in particular your recourse if something goes wrong.  If you and your virtual assistant are both located in the US you would have an easier time collecting damages should something go wrong.  I suggest you evaluate your level of comfort for risk vs. cost.  If you feel that the risk is too high to use an overseas service versus the savings, then find someone in the states to do this work.  Depending on your needs and comfort you might want to seek out a CPA or other licensed/bonded professional.  Yes the cost might be higher however you might find that it is worth it for your own piece of mind. As a side note you might even consider finding a local part-time assistant. This can often be more useful than a virtual assistant and may not cost as much as you think. If you can live without someone being bonded.  (or are willing to pay for the bonding fee) yourself,  depending on your market and needs you may be able to find an existing highly qualified EA or other person that wants some after hours work.   If you are in a college town, finance, accounting or legal majors make great assistants.  They will usually work a couple hours a week for ""beer money"", they have flexible schedules and are glad to have something pertinent to their degree to put on their resume when they graduate.  Just be prepared to replace them every few years as they move on to real jobs."
"The simplest answer to why you can't see it in your online statement is a design/business decision that was made, most probably originally to make online statements differ as little as possible from old fashioned monthly printed statements; the old printed statements never showed holds either. Some banks and card services actually do show these transactions online, but in my experience these are the rare exceptions - though with business/commercial accounts I saw this more, but it was still rare. This is also partly due to banks fearing lots of annoying phone calls from customers and problems with merchants, as people react to ""hey, renting that car didn't cost $500!"" and don't realize that the hold is often higher than the transaction amount and will be justified in a few days (or weeks...), etc - so please don't dispute the charges just yet. Behind the scenes, I've had bankers explain it to me thusly (the practice has bitten me before and it bothered me a lot, so I've talked to quite a few bankers about this): There are two kinds of holds: ""soft holds"" and ""hard holds"". In a soft hold, a merchant basically asks the bank, ""Hey, is there at least $75 in this account?"" The bank responds, and then has it's own individually set policy per account type as to how to treat that hold. Sometimes they reserve no money whatsoever - you are free to spend that money right out and rack up NSF fees to your heart's content. Yet some policies are to treat this identically to a hard hold and keep the money locked down until released. The hard hold is treated very much like an actual expenditure transaction, in that the money is locked and shown as no longer available to you. This varies by bank - some banks use an ""Account Balance"" and an ""Available Balance"", and some have done away with these dual terms and leave it up to you to determine what your balance is and what's ""available"" (or you have to call them). The key difference in the hard hold and a real expenditure is, technically, the money is still in your bank account; your bank has merely ""reserved"" it, earmarking it for a specific purchase (and gently promising the merchant they can have their money later), but the biggest difference is there is a time-limit. If a merchant does not process a completion to the transaction to claim the money, your bank will lift the hold after a period of time (I've seen 7-30 days as typical in the US, again varying by institution) returning your money to your balance that is available for purchasing and withdrawal. In every case, any vaguely decent banking institution allows you to call them, speak to some bank employee, and they can look up your account and inform you about the different sort of holds that are on your account that are not pending/completed purchase transactions. From a strictly cynical (perhaps rightly jaded) point of view, yes this is also used as a method to extort absurdly high fees especially from customers who keep a low balance in their account. I have had more than one bank charge NSF fees based on available balances that were due to holds made by gas pumps, for instance, even though my actual ""money in my account"" never went below $0 (the holds were for amounts larger than the actual transaction). And yes, the banks usually would waive those fees if you bothered to get someone on the phone or in person and made yourself a nuisance to the right person for long enough, but they made you work for it. But I digress.... The reality is that there are lots of back and forth and middle-men in transactions like this, and most banks try to hide as much of this from you the client as possible, partly because its a huge confusing hassle and its part of why you are paying a bank to handle this nonsense for you to start with.  And, as with all institutions, rules and policies become easily adjusted to maximize revenues, and if you don't keep sizable liquid minimum balances (100% of the time, all year long) they target you for fees.  To avoid this without having fat wads of extra cash in those accounts, is use an entirely disconnected credit card for reservations ONLY - especially when you are traveling and will be making rentals and booking hotels. Just tell them you wish to pay with a different card when you are done, and most merchants can do this without hassle. Since it's a credit card with monthly billing you can often end up with no balance, no waiting around for a month for payments to clear, and no bank fees! It isn't 100%, but now I never - if I can possibly avoid it - use my debit/bank card to ""reserve"" or ""rent"" anything, ever." "Nearly every country has its own exchange because so many countries have their own currency, and currency permeates every part of an exchange's business.   Generally, an exchange will support transaction and settlement only in local currency.  Securities (except those that explicitly enable FX trading) are denominated and will trade in a single currency-- you can only buy a share of IBM in U.S. dollars.  Securities trading always seeks to be a clean, frictionless, scalable process, and adding cross-currency translation to the mix would just complicate things.  So it's one exchange, one currency. In most countries, citizens and even businesses are largely restricted to having bank accounts in local currency.  There are various political reasons for this, but there it is:  it is difficult or impossible to open a domestic bank account in a foreign-denominated currency.  A public company headquartered in a given country will be required to publish financial statements in local currency, will be more likely to do business with the local citizenry and businesses in that currency, and so will likely look for investors from that same pool-- which generally means listing in local currency, which means on an exchange in that country. There are exceptions, of course.  Big multinationals do business all over the world, and many seek investors all over the world as well.  Mechanisms have been created to permit this (American Depositary Receipts or ADRs, for example).  But once again, cross-currency translation makes things more complicated, so ADRs and their like are only practical for very big international players. As to why there may be many exchanges in a single country, IMO Nick R has it right.  Read ""Flash Boys""; many market makers profit from trading between exchanges, and so have an interest in there being many of them.  And in the U.S., regulators have expressed an interest in ""innovation"" in the exchange space, and so permit them.  There is also an argument to be made against having a single ""Too Big To Fail"" exchange just like the argument for banks, but I wouldn't call that a ""reason"" for the current state of affairs." "A substantial portion of Native American poverty is ""reservation poverty."" It is influenced by historical US Indian policy, reservation policies and deals, and certain cultural idiosyncrasies. For example, Cherokee are poorer than the people who reside in the land they were expelled from on the trail of tears. That was an interruption of capital accumulation. The distribution of proceeds of casino, oil, and other land deals wasn't exactly perfect welfare policy. Finally, in some communities there are harmful institutions such as arranged marriages of teen girls.   African American poverty has an almost entirely separate history, and is concentrated in different areas." "American Express was originally a mail business that moved into money-orders. Traditionally their cards have been charge cards instead of a credit card (though they have credit products now as well). They've been marketed specifically as a ""premium"" product for people who have a significant amount of money (and are willing to pay a significant fee for premium services such as AmEx's good airline miles). As such, Visa and MasterCard are more widespread. Additionally, the fees that Visa and MasterCard charge merchants are typically lower (Wikipedia says 2%, as compared to AmEx's 2.5%, at least in the US). So: American Express gets less business as a company, but they charge higher fees to make up for it. Merchants will only accept the higher fees when they want to serve people who have a lot of money to spend (or if they can negotiate a discount)." Do you need it? It doesn't sound like it - you seem to be able to manage with just the cards you have.  Will it hurt anything? Probably not either, unless it entices you to spend more than you make.  Another downside might be that you would spend more than you normally would just to have activity on every card. So all in all, I don't see much upside. Its on their servers which means its accessible via the internet.  And why are you concern about police license plate vacuums?  You afraid they are going to clean your plate?  And why are you more afraid of the DMV getting hacked?  If the DMV gets hacked they won't have access to your credit card info at best social security number. You're right that someone who, say, photographed the front of your card at the store could use it to make some online purchases. Schemes like Visa's 3-D Secure provide additional online security by having you enter your password on the issuer's website, but they aren't common yet in the US. But as littleadv says, you as the cardholder generally aren't liable for fraud (except $50 in some cases). Just be sure to check your statement monthly and notify the issuer of any fraud within 60 days. To issuers, fraud losses are fairly predictable, and the cost is acceptable. some of that article is misleading, some of it is just plain wrong. Very wrong... like you end up drawing an incorrect conclusion type wrong.  Corporate transaction accounts, whose balances are up recently due to TAG (expires 12/31), are subject to reserve requirements.  When you purchase something with a credit card, the bank's asset of your credit increases and the bank's asset of cash decreases (it goes wherever you purchased).  There is no change to your deposit account and no change to reserves.  The incoming bank's cash account and liability account associated with that business transaction account increase, and it is trivial to transfer the % of cash necessary to reach minimum reserve requirements to the Fed.  Secondly, anyone with a smidgen of accounting can tell that his balance sheet won't balance.