Several months ago, my favorite coffee shop in Austin switched from using a traditional credit card reader to the free Square device that attaches to an iPhone. I groaned when I saw it. Every time I swipe my card through a Square reader, the whole transaction feels slower and more cumbersome and often takes a few tries to get right.

This week, Square introduced a new product, the Square Stand, designed to fix that problem and make transactions faster and more seamless.

When it comes to credit report errors that are hard to get fixed, not even U.S. senators are immune.

At a senate hearing held Tuesday to discuss the country's controversial credit reporting system, three Democratic senators sitting on the panel, Sen. Claire McCaskill of Missouri, Sen. Brian Schatz of Hawaii and Sen. Bill Nelson of Florida, confessed that they, too, had found errors on their credit reports.

If you prefer to pay with plastic rather than with your smartphone, you're not alone. Despite ongoing hype about how mobile payments are poised to take over the way we pay, most people seem happy to stick to what they've got.

As Apple CEO Tim Cook said in an earnings call last week, mobile payments are "just getting started" and have yet to reach a tipping point with consumers. That's good news for entrepreneurs, since opportunity abounds if you're innovative enough to create something that will stick.

If sharing information about what you buy with strangers makes you squeamish, then you may want to think twice about swiping your credit card.

Everyone from the IRS to your neighborhood burger joint wants to know what you charge to your card. And, increasingly, new tools and services -- courtesy of credit card issuers and other businesses -- are allowing them to sneak a peek.

It happens to the best of us.

NBC News reporter Chuck Todd recently learned that an unpaid red light ticket that he ignored (or, according to his tweets, just didn't see) has tarnished his credit score, according to MediaBistro's FishbowlDC.

A group of Democratic senators are trying to pass a bill that's supposed to help curb the number of impressionable teens and college students who sign up for bigger student loans than they can afford.

I wish something like that existed when I was a clueless teen.

In a New York Times magazine article posted Tuesday, economics reporter Annie Lowrey posed a question that I've thought about often: "Do millennials stand a chance in the real world?"

According to mounting research, odds are it's going to be tough.

Both VantageScore and FICO are developing new credit scores that incorporate nontraditional data.

But will more lenders -- many of whom still rely on the plain-Jane, credit-based FICO score -- actually use it?

If you value your privacy, the past several years have been rough.

Advertisers are trying to make money off you by following your activities on the Web. Credit card issuers are tracking what you buy -- not just for anti-fraud purposes. And dozens of consumer reporting companies are collecting and selling so much personal and financial information about you that if you pulled all that data together in one place, you'd essentially create a revealing biography of who you are -- and how you choose to live.

That -- along with my semi-monthly trips to the auto mechanic this fall -- should have been my cue to stop the procrastination and finally buy a more reliable car. But, like many recession-scarred Americans, I probably won't -- at least, not any time soon.

The CFPB is recommending that consumers ask for their file disclosures from each of the specialty consumer reporting companies that are collecting their financial minutiae -- ranging from utility payments to insurance claims -- at least once per year.

The problem is it takes so much time and effort to pull every report that could possibly be misreporting your financial information that only the most dedicated consumers -- with plenty of free time -- are likely to follow through.

A startup company based in Durham, N.C., says it can help keep your credit reports error-free by blocking an error from occurring in the first place.

How? By pressuring lenders and even debt collectors to accurately report your payments to the credit bureaus -- or else.

Last weekend, I married my Canadian sweetheart in a casual ceremony, surrounded by our closest friends and family. Less than a week later, I'm still having a hard time processing how much we actually spent on an event that lasted just a little more than five hours.

I'm still not ready to tally up the final number. However, here's a hint: We spent nowhere near the average cost of a U.S. wedding, which hit $27,021 in 2011, according to TheKnot.com and WeddingChannel.com. However, thanks to the generosity of my family and the sudden rush of wedding fever that comes with being newly engaged, we spent a lot more than the $5,000 that I originally had in mind.

If you, too, are knee-deep in wedding planning or are just recently engaged, here are some hard-won tips for keeping your own wedding costs from spiraling out of control.

After spending more than an hour filling out forms and going over our options with a personal banker, we drove to a local eatery -- which was my suggestion; he would have rather saved the cash and eaten in -- and hashed out a blueprint for how we'll manage our money.

By the time we left the restaurant, I was drained. We're both planners, and so we had talked about these issues before. But this was harder. It was the real deal.

Would you call off your wedding if you just found out your partner was deeply in debt? How about if he missed a couple of credit card payments and now has a black mark on his credit report?

It's an uncomfortable question, and the answer you get depends on the person you ask -- and the depth of the financial damage, according to a recent study by TD Ameritrade.

A few years ago, I had a nagging pain that felt like a runner's stitch on the right side of my stomach. It didn't hurt much, but it wouldn't go away. Feeling nauseous and tired, I decided to stop by an urgent care center after work just in case.

Several hours later, I was wheeled in to an operating room at my local hospital for emergency surgery. It turned out I had acute appendicitis and if I had waited any longer, I would have been doubling over in pain.

Is my generation greedy? Ask cash-strapped millennials what their goals are in life and they're unlikely to say that it's lending a helping hand. Instead, they rather just help themselves.

At least, that's according to a recent, well-publicized study published last month in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Researchers found that millennials rate "being very well-off financially" as more important and are less likely than the generations that came before them to join the Peace Corps or participate in community council meetings.

Thanks to Nerd Wallet for featuring my blog "What's the matter with 20-somethings?" in the 354th edition of the Carnival of Personal Finance, a weekly roundup of the best personal finance posts on the web.

When I turned 27 last fall, one of the first things my baby boomer father said to me over the phone was something like, "27 ... huh ... that's old." He sounded surprised, as if he couldn't believe that his youngest daughter was just a few years away from turning 30.

However, there was something else unspoken, too. I may be closer to 30 than to 20, but I'm nowhere near achieving the financial milestones my parents had attained when they were my age.