Card Reviews
Delta SkyMiles® Reserve American Express Card review
The Delta SkyMiles Reserve American Express Card helps frequent fliers climb the Delta Medallion ladder…
Consumer banking and lending, credit card pricing and product trends, interest rates, consumer financial protection, credit scores and credit reports, consumer reporting, nontraditional underwriting, big data, fintech, consumer research and mental health, financial self-efficacy, gaps in consumer financial transparency and the impact lenders’ product decisions have on people’s lives
Has covered personal finance and consumer lending for more than a decade.
Articles about consumer credit and lending have been published by a wide variety of outlets, including CreditCards.com, The Balance, Forbes.com, LendingTree, Student Loan Hero, CompareCards, MagnifyMoney, DepositAccounts.com, Recruiter.com, MyWalletJoy, NBCNews.com, FoxBusiness.com, Money.com, MSN and Yahoo! Finance.
Her reporting for CreditCards.com, in particular, has been widely cited in numerous reports, books and journal articles, including by researchers and consumer advocates at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), the National Consumer Law Center (NCLC), Consumer Action, the Milken Institute, Public Interest Research Group (PIRG), the FinReg Lab and the Young Invincibles.
One of the first reporters to write comprehensively about lenders’ growing use of alternative data, her articles about big data and consumer underwriting have also been cited in a number of law reviews, including the Southern California Law Review, the Boston College Journal of Law and Social Justice, the North Carolina Journal of Law and Technology and the Arizona State Law Journal.
In addition to writing about personal finance, she enjoys drawing and writing essays and has taken multiple postgraduate courses in graphic design, multimedia storytelling, digital illustration and creative nonfiction.
Kelly Dilworth (she/her) has been writing about personal finance for more than a decade, with a special focus on credit cards and consumer lending.
Kelly began her career in journalism as a paid intern at The Atlantic shortly after graduating from Sarah Lawrence College, then detoured into nonfiction book publishing for a few years.
She returned to journalism in 2010 after moving back home to Texas and began covering credit card interest rates and pricing for CreditCards.com. In 2011, she took over web editing and freelancer wrangling duties for six of CreditCards.com’s sister sites, including four international sites and a site dedicated to small business payments, before being promoted to staff reporter the following year.
As a staff reporter for CreditCards.com, Kelly covered Federal Reserve policy and research and tracked credit card interest rates and pricing for CreditCards.com’s Weekly Credit Card Rate Report (which she continues to write today).
In addition, she wrote multiple longer-form enterprise stories on consumer reporting and underwriting—several of which continue to be cited by researchers and consumer advocates.
In addition, Kelly wrote a number of comprehensive guides on consumer protection laws, such as the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) and the Fair Credit Billing Act (FCBA), and numerous articles on credit reporting and the credit report dispute process.
After becoming a mom in 2014, Kelly temporarily scaled back and shifted mostly to product reporting for CreditCards.com and other outlets. In this role, she wrote hundreds of comprehensive reviews of popular credit cards and other financial products and gained valuable insight and expertise into the products lenders offered and the way they presented them to prospective customers. In addition, she has written numerous consumer education pieces in recent years for a variety of personal finance outlets, including CreditCards.com, The Balance, LendingTree and Forbes Advisor.
In 2020, Kelly began studying graphic design and visual communication and now also uses digital illustration and design as a complement to select stories with the goal of helping readers who learn visually make better sense of personal finance.
Kelly’s favorite stories to work on, regardless of format, help shed light on issues that directly affect people’s well-being and budgets and provide readers with practical, expert-driven advice.
Kelly holds a B.A. in Liberal Arts from Sarah Lawrence College and has taken post-graduate courses in graphic design and multimedia storytelling from the University of Toronto and the Ontario College of Art and Design. In addition, she has studied writing with a wide range of working writers and taken postgraduate classes on craft and contemporary publishing with Catapult, Barrelhouse, Creative Nonfiction, Firefly Creative Writing and American Short Fiction.
Our editorial team and expert review board provide an unbiased analysis of the products we feature. Our comparison service is compensated by our credit card company partners, and may influence where or how products are featured on the site. This site does not include all credit card companies or all available credit card offers. Please note: The star-rating system on this page is based on our independent card scoring methodology and is not influenced by advertisers or card issuers.Learn more about our partners and how we make money.
Personal Quote
"When I tell people that I write about personal finance for a living, they often tell me that they feel intimidated by the topic and avoid thinking about their money as much as possible. I used to feel that way, too. And even after a decade of writing about personal finance, I still put off looking at my retirement statements until the last possible moment! But as I've learned over the years, personal finance doesn't have to be complicated, nor does it have to be intimidating. In fact, research shows that the more you learn about it, the greater your sense of control will be over your financial destiny--and that's worth a lot. Mastering your personal finances won't solve any of the huge structural or societal problems that also affect people's finances. But it can help give you greater peace of mind by giving you the knowledge and tools you need to protect yourself from overpayments and unscrupulous financial practices and make the best possible decisions for you."
Education & Honors
Professional Groups
Latest Posts
Card Reviews
Delta SkyMiles® Reserve American Express Card review
The Delta SkyMiles Reserve American Express Card helps frequent fliers climb the Delta Medallion ladder…
Card Reviews
Gold Visa® Card review
The PenFed Gold Visa card offers one of the lowest standard APRs you can get…
Card Reviews
Discover it® Balance Transfer review
The Discover it card pairs a generous balance transfer promotion with a solid first year…
Card Reviews
Navy Federal Credit Union cashRewards Card review
Read our review of the Navy Federal Credit Union cashRewards Card to see why it's…
Card Reviews
Navy Federal Credit Union Visa Signature Flagship Rewards card review
Read our review of the Navy Federal Credit Union Visa Signature Flagship Rewards credit card…
Card Reviews
Bank of America® Premium Rewards® credit card review
The new Bank of America Premium Rewards credit card is an especially great deal for…
CreditCards.com is an independent, advertising-supported comparison service. The offers that appear on this site are from companies from which CreditCards.com receives compensation. This compensation may impact how and where products appear on this site, including, for example, the order in which they may appear within listing categories. Other factors, such as our own proprietary website rules and the likelihood of applicants' credit approval also impact how and where products appear on this site. CreditCards.com does not include the entire universe of available financial or credit offers.
CCDC has partnerships with issuers including, but not limited to, American Express, Bank of America, Capital One, Chase, Citi and Discover.