Jon Yates

When he purchased the Lowe's gift card in March 2011, Jesse Houk thought it was an incredible deal. The home improvement chain had a special in which it would add 10 percent to any card purchased — roughly the equivalent of sales tax. It...

Every year at about this time, I get on my What's Your Problem? soapbox and deliver a batch of consumer resolutions. To keep this annual tradition from becoming, ahem, stale, I asked friends of the Problem Solver's Facebook page to help out this year....

The Bears' season might have fizzled toward the end, but it finally paid off for fan Chuck Lesnik. The season ticket holder from Naperville, featured in the Dec. 2 column, sold his two seats to the Nov. 25 game against Minnesota for $325 apiece...

Mindy Hartman tried other phone companies, but none of them worked out. The Chambersburg, Pa., resident, blind since birth, is on the phone constantly, using it to attend telephonic prayer meetings, to play word games and to listen to Internet radio...

Mike Skogmo has recovered from the snowboarding accident that broke three vertebrae and lacerated his liver. But it's taking longer to fix his insurance mess. The Buffalo Grove native, featured in the Nov. 11 column, was injured Christmas Day 2010 while...

Lainie Weisman's first cross-country plane trip alone never got off the ground because of bad weather. The silver lining was that her mother, Mary Weisman, had purchased trip insurance to cover such a situation. That meant the family could recover the...

Mark Geinosky may never know why he received 24 unwarranted parking tickets, but the former Orland Park resident finally has some closure in the case. Geinosky said Wednesday that he has reached a settlement to end his federal lawsuit against the city...

Carl Bank didn't realize he was eligible for Cook County's Senior Freeze Exemption on his property taxes until this spring. His tax preparer asked why he hadn't applied for the exemption, which could take thousands of dollars per year off his taxes....

Chuck Lesnik didn't want to miss the Bears game last Sunday against the Vikings, but he thought he was going to be out of town. So in September, the Naperville resident listed his two seats on StubHub. He figured if he couldn't go, he might as well make...

Back before high-speed Internet, way back in the 1990s, Thomas Tobin signed up with AT&T for dial-up service. He was assigned an att.net email address, which followed him through several moves. Eventually, he switched from dial-up to a faster, more...

You have to give the thief this much: He was certainly bold. While Paul and Jean Sandquist sat blissfully unaware inside their Oak Park home on the afternoon of April 30, someone broke through the locked door to the couple's garage. Once inside, the...

The email promised that because she was a Sears "premier" member, Cathy Graves would have access to the company's exclusive pre-Black Friday sale. It seemed almost too good to be true. The Plainfield resident had been looking for an inexpensive...