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.
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:
Dave Ramsey Love and Money
Filed under: Credit, Dave Ramsey, Education, Finance, Saving, Spending
This is a great episode. I hope you enjoy it.
Start Late, Finish Rich
Filed under: Books, Education, Finance, Money, Saving, Spending
Tis the season for resolutions.
A lot of people will make the resolution to read more and learn to take control of their finances.
Here is a good book that I recently finished and it fits 2 of my requirements for a good book. It was easy to read and contained some really good information.
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.
Mind tricks?
I ran across an interesting story over at Life Hacker about how our minds perceive numbers and while I don’t believe that all people suffer from this, it would explain how some people get deeper into debt while knowing it’s bad.
Bigger Numbers Trick Your Mind Into Buying
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.
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.
Who Is Going To Pay For The Bank Failures?
Filed under: Banks, Finance, Politics, Rant, Uncategorized
I know that some people have been wondering when I’d do a rant on the bank failures and the bail outs after all, this is blog is Financial Rants, and to tell the truth, I’ve been in too much shock to really write. I mean, what the hell is the government doing and what does this mean really? OK, so the fed takes over these banks and AIG using tax payer money. I heard today that it could all cost a Trillion dollars of our money before it’s over. Does this mean we own it since we paid for it? When do we get our shares? Do we get dividends when/if they recover? I’m pretty sure that’s a no. When they sell all the assets of the banks, who is going to get to buy them? I wish I could say they will sell at a fair market value, but we know they will sell to their friends. I have no faith in the government. Where the hell is the money coming from? We are 9,667,305,947,089.83 in debt at the time I wrote this and it’s increasing at 1.84 Billion a day not counting the bank mess. So thanks to my curiosity and to get my mind off the bank mess, I decided to look up the deficit over the years and found this chart of deficits by president. And it pissed me off even more. I’m not an economist but I know that if we ran our bank accounts like Republicans run the budget, we’d be bankrupt in a month, and the Lambo would be repossessed.
Who’s to blame for all this mess? Is it the Republicans? Democrats? Greed? Stupidity? Corruption? Truthfully, I believe it was too big to be one thing. Yes, both the Democrats and Republicans could have done some things better, but to be fair, hind site is always 20/20. Right now, everyone is telling us what went wrong as if it was so damned apparent a blind monkey could have saw it coming a mile away.
So, what do you do if your bank is one of the unlucky ones? I found this article on MSN that has some handy info.
What to do if your bank is siezed
I do see one good thing coming out of this mess. There is no way that any politician will say it’s a good idea to divert Social Security to the stock market for a long time. At least I hope not.
I don’t want this blog to be about politics nor do I want to take sides on this blog. I created this blog to help people learn about money and to give people a few laughs along the way, not to promote my political views. But….
You know what else is pissing me off this week? Having my intelligence insulted by politicians. It’s one thing to screw up and put some incorrect info in an ad, but to have the media and factcheck.org prove it’s not just incorrect but a bald faced lie and to continue to claim it is true is just insulting.
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