Poonkulali Thangavelu

Expertise

Consumer law, Monetary policy, Debt management, Mortgages

Highlights

• Extensive journalism experience covering personal finance and business topics
• Covered home price fluctuations leading up to the housing market crash
• Views credit cards as a good financial resource to draw on, if used wisely

Experience

Poonkulali Thangavelu is a senior writer and columnist at CreditCards.com and Bankrate, addressing debt and credit card-related legal and regulatory issues.

She believes that making good financial decisions enables people to get more out of life and is happy to contribute to this endeavor. She uses credit cards extensively and sees them as a good financial resource to draw on, if used wisely.

She has extensive journalism experience covering personal finance and business topics. She draws on her financial expertise (she holds an MBA degree, with finance and marketing concentrations, as well as a BA in economics from accredited Indian universities, in addition to an M.A. in journalism from the University of Mississippi, where she was awarded a graduate assistantship) and likes to simplify the subject matter to enable readers to make good decisions. And she has participated in the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton seminars for business journalists program to keep abreast of business topics.

While covering the mortgage market for National Mortgage News, she curated and edited a newsletter targeting the home-equity lending niche of the mortgage industry. In this role, she cautioned that home prices were getting out of hand in the period leading to the housing market crash that started in 2006.

She has also contributed to multiple business and consumer-oriented publishers, including Investopedia, CreditKarma and Multi-Housing News. Her work has been picked up by various national publishers such as the San Francisco Gate, Chicago Tribune and McGraw Hill, along with being syndicated to Fidelity, MSN, Nasdaq, Yahoo! and others.

Her career includes a stint doing consumer market research for global advertising agency Ogilvy (formerly Ogilvy & Mather) as well as experience as an equity analyst and writer.