This guest post is written by Ted Higgins, a financial writer for the Total Bankruptcy Blog.

During the World Cup, soccer players will flop, feign, and fall in order to draw penalties against their opponents. Unfortunately, this sort of scamming also occurs away from the field. In fact, major international events like the World Cup create a golden opportunity for criminals operating credit card scams.

Running your own business takes energy, organization – and a whole lot of money. Using a credit card for funding a small business can provide you with the resources you need when you don’t have the cash. However, due to small business credit cards’ exclusion from protection under the Credit CARD Act, you should think twice before carrying a balance on your small business credit card.

Even though it’s called a business credit card, the business owner is still personally responsible for the debt incurred at the end of the day. Since the owner is assuming this risk already, it makes sense to use a personal credit card for purposes such as funding or any other expense that you can’t pay back right away. This way the Credit CARD Act will provide the protection you need when carrying a balance.

The storyline in recent months has been that we are in better financial shape than we were this time last year. While that may be true by some measures, CardHub.com released the Q1 2010 Credit Card Debt Study this week, which revealed that consumers are on track to end up with more debt at the end of 2010 than 2009, despite positive signals in the economy.

The CardHub.com study focused on consumer debt data from the Federal Reserve’s G19 report in conjunction with quarterly charge off data to determine how much of the decline in consumer credit card debt is actually due to consumers paying down their debt versus bad debt being written off. The study also made projections on how much debt consumers will accumulate in subsequent quarters of 2010.

As we all know, the Credit CARD Act that came into effect earlier this year was meant to protect consumers from egregious practices by the credit card companies. By and large, the new rules do a good job in accomplishing this goal. However, there was one revision in the final draft of the bill around payment allocation that does not have the consumer’s best interest at heart.

The new payment allocation rules state that any payment above the minimum must be applied to the balance with the highest APR first. While this is an improvement from the previous payment allocation rules, it still offers no benefit to people who can only afford to pay the minimum payment each month – that’s 29 percent of Americans according to a FINRA National Survey.