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?
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
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.
The Banks Aren’t Telling You Everything or We’ll Change The Rules When We Feel Like It.
Filed under: Banks, Credit, Fees, Interest Rates, Rant, Spending
I ran across this story over on MSN.
10 Things Your Bank Won’t Tell You
One of the things it talks about is something I’ve suspected for a long time, some (if not all) banks post the big charges first, then the smaller charges and this of course increases the likelihood that you will have more overdraft fees. They claim that they do it for your benefit because a mortgage payment is more important than other payments. Maybe it is, but so is the multiple fees to their bottom line. If someone is already running on empty, an extra 100 bucks a month like the mother of three in the story is going to make things even harder. 100 bucks sounds like a lot but remember it’s only about 3 overdraft fees. Granted, we shouldn’t be running that close to empty, but things happen especially in today’s economy.
Another thing the article talks about is how banks can change the terms at any time. Take for example Bank Of America jacking the rates from 10%-12% to 27% or more even though the affected customers had done nothing wrong. They claim 94% had no increase last year. So just how many customers is 6%??? Well, their website says they serve approximately 53 million consumer households and I’ll guess some of those households have multiple people/accounts, but for the sake of simplicity, let’s go with 50 million which gives us 3 million affected customers. So you have better odds of having your rates tripled than you do at winning the freaking lottery even if you do nothing wrong. I wonder if the way they choose who gets nailed has anything to do with my paranoia from a few days ago when I asked if you were feeling paranoid yet.
So for crying out loud, keep your checkbook balanced and don’t count of the float time that we used to have. With the advances in technology, there isn’t much time left. Postpone buying whatever shiny new toy that is calling your name and build up a cushion.
If you must use credit then Compare Credit Cards and get the best rates you can.
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