Credit Card Companies Are Bending The Rules
Filed under: Banks, Credit, Fees, Finance, Interest Rates, Spending
According to this Wall Street Journal Article Beware That New Credit-Card Offer the credit card companies are pushing cards that don’t have all the protections that the Card Act or Credit Card Accountability and Responsibility and Disclosure Act of 2009 gave consumers. Of course the companies claim they aren’t offering business cards to individuals but why believe them. They’ve shown how they feel about their customers in the past.
You really should read the entire article and pay attention to the offer you apply for.
Your life style can hurt your credit!!!
Filed under: Banks, Credit, FICO, Interest Rates, Spending, Wal-Mart
According to an article on Money central, the credit card companies are using all kinds of info that they’ve collected about you to lower your credit limit and since lower limits mean higher utilization and lower credit scores, where you shop can lower your credit score. There’s several other factors that they use that should anger business owners, state officials and every person who uses credit. Here’s a few
What you buy
Where you shop
If people who were victims of the subprime loan mess happen to shop there
If you live in a state hit hard by foreclosures, such as Florida, Nevada and California
Would these last 2 mean that shopping at Wal-Mart in Florida, Nevada or California would lower your credit limit since they are the largest retail store and most likely subprime borrowers shop there?
The full article is here. Can your lifestyle hurt your credit?
I just read this article on Yahoo and the thing that interested me the most was the part about people feeling a sinking feeling when they see how long it’ll take to pay off their balance. It’s not like everyone hasn’t heard that it’ll take forever to pay off a balance by paying minimum payments, so either the people who will get the shock, weren’t paying attention or were in denial.
The article also covered ways that the law backfired like:
New CRL Report: Credit Card Issuers Use Loopholes to Bypass New Rules Intended to Curb Abuses
Filed under: Banks, Credit, Education, Fees, Interest Rates, Uncategorized
I think we all expected the credit card companies to find loopholes and continue to abuse the American people so finding this US Newswire article didn’t really surprise me.
New CRL Report: Credit Card Issuers Use Loopholes to Bypass New Rules Intended to Curb Abuses
According to a report from the Center for Responsible Lending, the credit card issuers are making it all but impossible for the average person to know what the real cost of their debt is.
Some of the items that were mentioned were
Dave Ramsey Love and Money
Filed under: Credit, Dave Ramsey, Education, Finance, Saving, Spending
This is a great episode. I hope you enjoy it.
Free money
Filed under: Banks, Bonus Money, Credit, Finance, Free Money, Investing, Lending Club, Money
I’ve recently discovered that it’s possible to find free money on the web. Not only is it free money, but you can loan the money to others to get rid of credit cards and other high interest rates so it’s a good thing on multiple levels.
Lending Club brings together individual investors and well-qualified borrowers who want fair credit (for everything from paying off high-interest credit cards to growing a small business).
With Lending Club you can diversify across many borrowers with good to excellent credit ratings. Lending Club lenders have earned annual returns that average over 9% in the past 18 months. Borrowers with excellent credit have been able to borrow at rates as low as 7.88%.
In case you’re interested, Lending Club offers a $50 welcome bonus to new lenders just for getting started. In addition, each time someone you invite borrows through Lending Club, you earn an additional financial reward that you can choose to keep or donate to a non-profit organization.
Lending Club has been in the Wall Street Journal, CBS News, CNN, NPR and the New York Times.
I’m not laughing
Filed under: Banks, Credit, FICO, Finance, Interest Rates, Politics
There’s dozens or hundreds of stories about the bail out package in the news and it seems like you can’t open the paper, turn on the news or surf the web without reading about it. This blog wasn’t started to cover this type of stories, it was started to rant and go nuts over so called experts who give vague, generic advice to unsuspecting people who believe they are looking out for the public.
However, since I started Financial Comedy the whole system went down the tubes and I’ve been scrambling to keep up.
The thing that comes to mind for me is why not reset every man and woman’s credit score to perfect so that everyone who has been screwed by the banking and credit system get’s a mulligan or a do over? The system has become so complicated that we need help managing our scores and although I haven’t read the new plan, the old plan would actually lower your score if you tried to pay an old collection account. You can also have rates raised if you were late on an unrelated bill. For example, your credit card could raise your rates if you were late on the electric bill regardless of if you were ever late on a credit card payment.
On top of how confusing the rules were, you couldn’t get the most important number in your credit life, your score without paying or joining a monitoring service and there were 3 different companies with 3 different scoring systems all of which were private.
Ok enough about this. I’m probably going to go back to my original plan and only touch on the bail out insanity from time to time but in the mean time, here’s a couple of stories I found interesting.
Senate Democrats promise to change stimulus bill
Why the bank bailouts are doomed
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again; I’m not blaming Democrats or Republicans, actually I’m blaming them both. They both are to blame and I don’t know which party is more at fault. I am optimistic that President Obama has good ideas and can improve the situation and hope that I’m proven correct.
What does this year hold?
There’s plenty of reasons to be pessimistic today and plenty of reasons to rant, like the banks not explaining where the bail out money went or or it taking until July 2010 for the consumer protection from credit card companies to go into effect, but I don’t feel like it. It must be the weather.
I am working on my New Years Resolutions and I’m kinda stuck. Most of the things I should get rid of, I don’t want to.
I am working on my time management and started rereading Successful Time Management: A Self-Teaching Guide, 2nd Edition
It really helped the last time I read it and I still use some of the tools I learned but I’m hoping to find something I missed or didn’t need at the time.
Time To Start Rebuilding
Filed under: Credit, Job Losses, Uncategorized, Work From Home
I think you can figure out that I read all kinds of articles when I’m looking for something that is useful to write about. Today I was on MSNBC and found this article about easing the blows of bad credit. Since the news is full of doom and gloom about the economy and the credit crunch, I figure there’s a lot of people who might need this info. Jean Chatzky wrote an interesting story called 5 tips to ease the blow of bad credit.
I still believe it’s important to have a Plan B and create multiple streams of income just so you’re prepared when life throws a monkey wrench in your plans. The Washington Post reported that payrolls dropped by 240,000 in October. I used to have a blog that just reported job losses until it became too depressing at about the time the count passed a million. Every time I read a story about massive layoffs, I have to wonder how many of them had a plan B and how many had been living paycheck to paycheck. I also have to wonder how many were blindsided by losing their job.
Fear Index
I’ve been watching the news about the economy and still trying to figure out what is going to happen. I heard a newscaster mention the Fear Index so I checked it out and it turns out that there is an index that measures the fear in the market. That’s really what’s driving the markets down after all. People are freaking out and selling everything they can and when there are that many sellers and no buyers, the price plummets.
I started out against the bailout and then realized that something had to be done or we’d be in even more trouble. If there isn’t any credit then businesses can’t keep doing business and the economy gets another hit. I don’t think the package they passed is exactly what we needed, but at least it’s something and maybe it will help.
I did notice the story about AIG blowing about 440 grand for a retreat less than a week after being bailed out. They said it was for their top performers but I just don’t see how they could justify it after being bailed out. I’m thinking they should have postponed or cancelled the trip. I also find it sad that the people who were responsible for the crash and quit or got fired before the bailouts get to keep all of their bonuses and the poor idiots who came in and tried to do the right thing will be considered guilty when they weren’t there long enough to do anything.
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