A Canadian man paid off his $114,460 student loan debt in one lump sum -- of cash. That's $111,350 U.S. 

How many university grads, unemployed and overburdened by student loans, would be jealous of that? 

In fact, maybe envy motivated some of the snarky online comments after a photo of the $114,460 bank receipt he posted on his Facebook Timeline surfaced elsewhere on the Internet.

This post comes from Quentin Fottrell at partner site SmartMoney.

If federal regulators limit the charges levied on prepaid debit card users, banking officials say the industry will likely just invent new fees.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Wednesday announced plans to develop new protections for the prepaid cards, which allow those who don't have bank accounts to make purchases or ATM withdrawals. The agency says the regulations would aim to rein in fees by making them more transparent and help consumers to recover stolen funds.

"Prepaid cards have far fewer regulatory protections than bank accounts or debit or credit cards," bureau director Richard Cordray said in a statement.

This post comes from Angela Colley at partner site Money Talks News.

Doing home improvement projects yourself can save you money. My frugal father once taught himself how to put a brick mailbox back together after I had backed into it with my car -- saving us both $500.

Then again, DIY projects can also cost you more money if you end up DIW (doing it wrong) and then have to hire a professional. So how do you know when to go it alone or go with a pro?

This post comes from Kimberly Palmer at partner site U.S. News & World Report.

While the Credit CARD Act of 2009 was celebrated for protecting consumers, it also contained a less-discussed clause that's now affecting stay-at-home parents: While nonworking spouses could previously take out credit cards in their own names by citing household income data, the new rules, as spelled out by the Federal Reserve, require credit card companies to consider only individual income.

That means anyone who doesn’t earn her own income, such as a stay-at-home mom, will have a much harder time qualifying for her own credit card.

These new rules infuriate many stay-at-home moms, who argue that they shouldn't be forced to give up their financial independence just because they choose to stay home to raise their children.

This post comes from Marilyn Lewis of MSN Money.

Good news keeps rolling in on the housing front. Caveat: Improvement is relative. Prices still are stuck in the basement. Millions more foreclosures will hit the market in coming years. But with feet firmly on the ground, there's no reason not to enjoy the spate of recent reports showing housing finally moving off the critical care list.

Up

Up is good for these five indicators:

Updated May 25 at 9:57 ET

Gas prices have been on a downhill slide since early April -- good news for the nearly 35 million Americans expected to drive somewhere nice for Memorial Day. And experts' predictions that prices would fall even more as the long holiday weekend arrived were mostly correct.

But just when you thought it was safe to get back into long-road-trip mode, gas prices shot up in some locations. For instance, a radio station reported an overnight 20-cent spike at some Louisville, Ky., gas stations earlier this week. 

This post comes from Penny Gusner at partner site CarInsurance.com.

You probably won't even realize anything is wrong until your car sounds funny and warning lights erupt on the dashboard.

Police across the country are reporting increased thefts of catalytic converters -- devices that remove some noxious gases from your car's exhaust. (Here are recent incidents from Detroit, Boston and Sacramento, Calif.)

Insurers often report increases in claims for catalytic converters when times are tough. The scrap value of the precious metals of platinum, palladium and rhodium in your car's catalytic converter is just too tempting for some people to pass up, especially when the crime takes only seconds and is relatively low risk.

This post comes from Quentin Fottrell at partner site SmartMoney.

For many people, Wi-Fi costs a cup of coffee. But as five major cable operators band together to spread free Wi-Fi across the country, some experts say consumers may end up buying everything from manicures to a pair of jeans in order to get online.

The cable operators plan to create a nationwide service called "CableWi-Fi" to give customers access to each other's wireless Internet hot spots. Existing customers of Time Warner, Comcast and Cablevision, Cox Communications and Bright House Networks will have access to more than 50,000 hot spots.