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.
Shooting The Sacred Cows Of Money
Filed under: Banks, Cashflow Quadrant, Education, Finance, Investing, Job Losses, Rich Dad Poor dad, Robert Kiyosaki, Uncategorized
Even if you don’t agree with everything that Robert Kiyosaki teaches, you really should watch the videos at Shooting The Sacred Cows Of Money and check out his point of view.I really like the point he makes about having a normal job being risky.
By the way, the site is free and also has some really cool tools.
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?
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
Debit Card Overdrafts Generate Massive Profits
I just read an interesting story that says that banks collect more in overdraft fees from debit cards than they do in profit. The article points out that some banks make it difficult or impossible to opt out of the service. There’s a lot of mixed reactions about this article and I have mixed emotions about this myself.
$100 Cash Bonus From Chase or Wamu
Pretty simple offer.
The Chase bonus ends 6/23/09
The Wamu offer ends 6/16/09
To qualify for the reward, you must open a new checking account with a $100 minimum opening deposit of new money (money not currently held by this bank). Also, within 60 calendar days of account opening, you must initiate a monthly direct deposit such as payroll, pension or Social Security, or have at least five debit card purchases (using your PIN or signature) posted to your account. The reward will be deposited into your new account within 2 weeks after the initial direct deposit or the five debit card purchases have posted to your account.
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.
HP Notebook Update
I received my notebook back from HP a few days ago and it was repaired at no charge. Strange thing is that it still runs hot and since the problem with it and thousands more of the nvidia Geforce GPUs is that they couldn’t handle the heat due to substandard manufacturing, I’m a little worried.
I did read a rumor that makes sense and pisses me off if true. The reason HP is covering the AMD models and not Intel is that AMD agreed to share the cost but Intel refused. I’m not sure why AMD would agree to pay part of the costs when nvidia admitted they had defective chips and set aside almost 2 million bucks.
While I am going to continue to follow the story and hope all of the people who are still trying to get some help as well as the people who didn’t know they weren’t alone, it’s time to get back to ranting about the financial system.
I’m not doing a rant today except that the feds reluctance to help the auto industry while giving buckets of money (a large part of which was doled out in bonuses) to the banks) made some of the conspiracy theorists sound logical when they talk about the federal reserve conspiracy. Actually some of the things I’ve read and watched claim that the federal reserve is owned by banks and not the American Government which more than explains why they would want the banks bailed out doesn’t it?
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