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By Funto Omojola, NerdWallet Mobile wallets that allow you to pay using your phone have been around for well more than a decade, and over those years they’ve grown in popularity, becoming a key part of consumers’ credit card usage. According to a “state of credit card report” for 2025 from credit bureau Experian, 53% of Americans in a survey say they use digital wallets more frequently than traditional payment methods. To further incentivize mobile wallet usage, some credit card issuers offer bonus rewards when you elect to pay that way. But those incentives can go beyond just higher reward rates. In fact, mobile wallets in some ways are becoming an essential part of activating and holding a credit card. For example, they can offer immediate access to your credit line, and they can be easier and safer than paying with a physical card. From a rewards perspective, it can make a lot of sense to reach for your phone now instead of your physical card. The Apple Card offers its highest reward rates when you use it through the Apple Pay mobile wallet. Same goes for the PayPal Cashback Mastercard® when you use it to make purchases via the PayPal digital wallet. The Kroger grocery store giant has a co-branded credit card that earns the most when you pay using an eligible digital wallet, and some major credit cards with quarterly rotating bonus categories have a history of incentivizing digital wallet use. But again, these days it’s not just about the rewards. Mobile wallets like Apple Pay, Samsung Pay and PayPal can offer immediate access to your credit line while you wait for your physical card to arrive after approval. Indeed, most major issuers including Bank of America®, Capital One and Chase now offer instant virtual credit card numbers for eligible cards that can be used upon approval by adding them to a digital wallet. Additionally, many co-branded credit cards — those offered in partnership with another brand — commonly offer instant card access and can be used immediately on in-brand purchases. Credit cards typically take seven to 10 days to arrive after approval, so instant access to your credit line can be particularly useful if you need to make an urgent or unexpected purchase. Plus, they allow you to start spending toward a card’s sign-up bonus right away. As issuers push toward mobile payments, a growing number of merchants and businesses are similarly adopting the payment method. The percentage of U.S. businesses that used digital wallets increased to 62% in 2023, compared to 47% the previous year, according to a 2023 survey commissioned by the Federal Reserve Financial Services. Wider acceptance is potentially good news for the average American, who according to Experian has about four credit cards. While that won’t necessarily weigh down your wallet, it can be hard to manage multiple cards and rewards categories at once. Mobile wallets offer a more efficient way to store and organize all of your workhorse cards, while not having to carry around ones that you don’t use often. They can also help you more easily monitor your spending and rewards, and some even track your orders’ status and arrival time. Plus, paying with a digital wallet offers added security. That’s because it uses technology called tokenization when you pay, which masks your real credit card number and instead sends an encrypted “token” that’s unique to each payment. This is unlike swiping or dipping a physical card, during which your credit card number is more directly accessible. And again, because a mobile wallet doesn’t require you to have your physical cards present, there’s less chance of one falling out of your pocket or purse. More From NerdWallet Funto Omojola writes for NerdWallet. Email: fomojola@nerdwallet.com. The article Activating Your Credit Card? Don’t Skip the Mobile Wallet Step originally appeared on NerdWallet .Exhibition Preview: Tokyo Auto Salon Exhibition
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WASHINGTON (AP) — As a former and potentially future president, Donald Trump hailed what would become Project 2025 as a road map for “exactly what our movement will do” with another crack at the White House. As the blueprint for a hard-right turn in America became a liability during the 2024 campaign, Trump pulled an about-face. He denied knowing anything about the “ridiculous and abysmal” plans written in part by his first-term aides and allies. Now, after being elected the 47th president on Nov. 5, Trump is stocking his second administration with key players in the detailed effort he temporarily shunned. Most notably, Trump has tapped Russell Vought for an encore as director of the Office of Management and Budget; Tom Homan, his former immigration chief, as “border czar;” and immigration hardliner Stephen Miller as deputy chief of policy. Those moves have accelerated criticisms from Democrats who warn that Trump’s election hands government reins to movement conservatives who spent years envisioning how to concentrate power in the West Wing and impose a starkly rightward shift across the U.S. government and society. Trump and his aides maintain that he won a mandate to overhaul Washington. But they maintain the specifics are his alone. “President Trump never had anything to do with Project 2025,” said Trump spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt in a statement. “All of President Trumps’ Cabinet nominees and appointments are whole-heartedly committed to President Trump’s agenda, not the agenda of outside groups.” Here is a look at what some of Trump’s choices portend for his second presidency. As budget chief, Vought envisions a sweeping, powerful perch The Office of Management and Budget director, a role Vought held under Trump previously and requires Senate confirmation, prepares a president’s proposed budget and is generally responsible for implementing the administration’s agenda across agencies. The job is influential but Vought made clear as author of a Project 2025 chapter on presidential authority that he wants the post to wield more direct power. “The Director must view his job as the best, most comprehensive approximation of the President’s mind,” Vought wrote. The OMB, he wrote, “is a President’s air-traffic control system” and should be “involved in all aspects of the White House policy process,” becoming “powerful enough to override implementing agencies’ bureaucracies.” Trump did not go into such details when naming Vought but implicitly endorsed aggressive action. Vought, the president-elect said, “knows exactly how to dismantle the Deep State” — Trump’s catch-all for federal bureaucracy — and would help “restore fiscal sanity.” In June, speaking on former Trump aide Steve Bannon’s “War Room” podcast, Vought relished the potential tension: “We’re not going to save our country without a little confrontation.” The strategy of further concentrating federal authority in the presidency permeates Project 2025′s and Trump’s campaign proposals. Vought’s vision is especially striking when paired with Trump’s proposals to dramatically expand the president’s control over federal workers and government purse strings — ideas intertwined with the president-elect tapping mega-billionaire Elon Musk and venture capitalist Vivek Ramaswamy to lead a “Department of Government Efficiency.” Trump in his first term sought to remake the federal civil service by reclassifying tens of thousands of federal civil service workers — who have job protection through changes in administration — as political appointees, making them easier to fire and replace with loyalists. Currently, only about 4,000 of the federal government’s roughly 2 million workers are political appointees. President Joe Biden rescinded Trump’s changes. Trump can now reinstate them. Meanwhile, Musk’s and Ramaswamy’s sweeping “efficiency” mandates from Trump could turn on an old, defunct constitutional theory that the president — not Congress — is the real gatekeeper of federal spending. In his “Agenda 47,” Trump endorsed so-called “impoundment,” which holds that when lawmakers pass appropriations bills, they simply set a spending ceiling, but not a floor. The president, the theory holds, can simply decide not to spend money on anything he deems unnecessary. Vought did not venture into impoundment in his Project 2025 chapter. But, he wrote, “The President should use every possible tool to propose and impose fiscal discipline on the federal government. Anything short of that would constitute abject failure.” Trump’s choice immediately sparked backlash. “Russ Vought is a far-right ideologue who has tried to break the law to give President Trump unilateral authority he does not possess to override the spending decisions of Congress (and) who has and will again fight to give Trump the ability to summarily fire tens of thousands of civil servants,” said Sen. Patty Murray of Washington, a Democrat and outgoing Senate Appropriations chairwoman. Reps. Jamie Raskin of Maryland and Melanie Stansbury of New Mexico, leading Democrats on the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability, said Vought wants to “dismantle the expert federal workforce” to the detriment of Americans who depend on everything from veterans’ health care to Social Security benefits. “Pain itself is the agenda,” they said. Trump’s protests about Project 2025 always glossed over overlaps in the two agendas. Both want to reimpose Trump-era immigration limits. Project 2025 includes a litany of detailed proposals for various U.S. immigration statutes, executive branch rules and agreements with other countries — reducing the number of refugees, work visa recipients and asylum seekers, for example. Miller is one of Trump’s longest-serving advisers and architect of his immigration ideas, including his promise of the largest deportation force in U.S. history. As deputy policy chief, which is not subject to Senate confirmation, Miller would remain in Trump’s West Wing inner circle. “America is for Americans and Americans only,” Miller said at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally on Oct. 27. “America First Legal,” Miller’s organization founded as an ideological counter to the American Civil Liberties Union, was listed as an advisory group to Project 2025 until Miller asked that the name be removed because of negative attention. Homan, a Project 2025 named contributor, was an acting U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement director during Trump’s first presidency, playing a key role in what became known as Trump’s “family separation policy.” Previewing Trump 2.0 earlier this year, Homan said: “No one’s off the table. If you’re here illegally, you better be looking over your shoulder.” John Ratcliffe, Trump’s pick to lead the CIA, was previously one of Trump’s directors of national intelligence. He is a Project 2025 contributor. The document’s chapter on U.S. intelligence was written by Dustin Carmack, Ratcliffe’s chief of staff in the first Trump administration. Reflecting Ratcliffe’s and Trump’s approach, Carmack declared the intelligence establishment too cautious. Ratcliffe, like the chapter attributed to Carmack, is hawkish toward China. Throughout the Project 2025 document, Beijing is framed as a U.S. adversary that cannot be trusted. Brendan Carr, the senior Republican on the Federal Communications Commission, wrote Project 2025′s FCC chapter and is now Trump’s pick to chair the panel. Carr wrote that the FCC chairman “is empowered with significant authority that is not shared” with other FCC members. He called for the FCC to address “threats to individual liberty posed by corporations that are abusing dominant positions in the market,” specifically “Big Tech and its attempts to drive diverse political viewpoints from the digital town square.” He called for more stringent transparency rules for social media platforms like Facebook and YouTube and “empower consumers to choose their own content filters and fact checkers, if any.”Our solar system could be subject to a violent “superflare” explosion from our sun sooner rather than later, researchers warn, based on a new analysis of behavior from similar stars. Stars, including our sun, regularly emit solar flares, or strong bursts of electromagnetic radiation. Superflares, however, are much more powerful than typical solar flares, emitting up to 10,000 times more radiation . And across the cosmos, these events might occur much more frequently than astronomers previously thought, according to a paper published in Science last week. The new results indicate that stars resembling our sun experience superflares approximately once every century—and if that’s true, it seems our sun may be overdue for such an explosion. As solar activity is already known to cause damage to Earth’s satellite and telecommunication systems, the discovery came as a shock to the team. “This is 40 to 50 times more frequent than previously thought,” Valeriy Vasilyev , a scientist at Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research (MPS) and a co-author of the paper, tells Space.com ’s Robert Lea. “Everything about this discovery was surprising.” What a blast! #Sun -like stars produce a #superflare on average about once every century per star, a research team led by #MPSGoettingen shows in today’s issue of @sciencemagazine . More here: https://t.co/GsigkmZWnA @UniGraz @UniOulu @prcnaoj_en @CUBoulder @unipariscite pic.twitter.com/31n8y6aczT Because superflares are relatively rare, Vasilyev and his team pulled data from 56,450 stars that share many characteristics with our sun. The data, previously collected by NASA’s Kepler space telescope between 2009 and 2013, gave them access to “evidence of 220,000 years of stellar activity,” explains study co-author Alexander Shapiro , an astrophysicist at Austria’s University of Graz, in a statement . From the data, they identified 2,889 occurrences of superflares on 2,527 stars, which led them to conclude that one sun-like star produces about one superflare every 100 years or so. Generally, stars of the same size and temperature share the same evolutionary life cycles, writes Korey Haynes for Astronomy magazine . As such, the aggregate behavior of these stars might serve as a predictor for how our sun will act. This is why astronomers are paying close attention to this new discovery. In particular, they hope that by better understanding when such events may occur, we can better prepare for the damage that could follow. For instance, the Carrington Event of 1859 , the strongest solar storm on record, ravaged telegraph networks across the globe. But the energy released during that flare is only one-hundredth of the enery thought to be associated with a superflare, the researchers say. Still, scientists point to a few reasons why superflares might not be a huge cause for alarm. On other stars, these powerful blasts tend to happen near the poles , Space.com reports, so such flares from our sun might miss the Earth entirely. In addition, the examined stars might not be perfect analogs for our sun, some scientists say —and 30 percent of the stars seen emitting superflares in the new study are found in pairs known as binary systems, notes Live Science ’s Ben Turner. Perhaps the tidal interactions between those stars, which would not apply to our sun, are triggering some of their flares. Ultimately, we don’t know for certain that our sun is capable of expelling a superflare, Vasilyev tells the New York Times ’ Katrina Miller. But “it’s nice to be prepared,” he adds. Solar flares are also associated with coronal mass ejections, or clouds of plasma and magnetic fields launched from the sun that rile up geomagnetic storms on Earth. “A geomagnetic storm takes place when Earth’s protective magnetic shield is pushed back or eroded by the solar wind,” Martin Connors , an astronomer at Athabasca University in Canada who was not involved with the study, tells Newsweek ’s Jess Thomson. Such storms would supercharge the northern and southern lights and potentially damage power grids and satellites, he says. Coronal mass ejections leave a geological record on Earth—an elevated level of a radioactive carbon isotope that appears in tree rings and ice cores. By looking for these signatures, scientists have identified five extreme solar storms from our sun, with the most damaging dating to 775 C.E., per the statement. But it remains unclear whether such events came from several flares rather than a single powerful one—and Earth’s records don’t reveal whther the sun has launched superflares that didn’t collide with our planet. Regardless, scientists involved in the study highlight the need for caution. Natalie Krivova , an astronomer at MPS, says in the statement that the “new data are a stark reminder that even the most extreme solar events are part of the sun’s natural repertoire.” Keeping this in mind, the team’s next step is to redirect their research to confirm how superflares could potentially affect Earth. “There are several directions we are pursuing,” Vasilyev says to Space.com . “For instance, we are investigating the impact of such events on the Earth’s atmosphere and technological systems, understanding the connection between superflares and extreme solar particle events and determining the conditions necessary to produce such superflares.” Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday. Gayoung Lee | | READ MORE Gayoung Lee is a science journalist from South Korea, now based in New York. Her main interest lies in exploring the unlikely connections between science and everyday life.