Financial Answers

Here we go again folks.  The government passes a bill to help you out and the financial institutions give us all an obscene gesture and stick it to us anyway.  If the financial institutions would spend the time dreaming up ways to generate income the right way instead of dreaming up ways they can screw their own customers it would be a better world.  But that would be too much of an effort on the part of corporate financial America.  In their minds, based on their actions, it’s easier to stick it to their complacent, ignorant credit card holders who seem too stupid and lazy to fight back then to do things the “right” way.

 The Card Act

When the Card Act (The Credit Card Accountability Responsibility and Disclosure Act of 2009- see my articles titled “Is this new credit card law a joke?” dated May 26, 2010 and “Credit Card Relief???  dated February 17, 2010 for more information) was enacted by congress to protect you from the confusion and complexities of the credit card system, the credit card issuers were already working on ways around it.  And to their sleazy credit they have managed to find many ways to stick it to you again.

Three of the top credit card issuers, Citigroup, Inc.(didn’t you bailout these dirtbags out recently?), J.P Morgan Chase & Co.(didn’t we also bail these dirtbags out also?) and Discover Financial Services are already coming up with ingenious new ways around the new credit card law to shake you down with new fees and charges.  These are just the obvious dirtbags.

What’s happening is our government regulators pass the laws and the deep money pockets of the credit card issuers have their herd of lowlife lawyers find ways around the laws and regulations which is another way of saying, “we can’t screw our current credit card holders this way anymore so let’s find new ways to do it.  We need to maintain our exorbitant lifestyles and not worry about the lower classes…their only there to serve our needs anyway.”

Isn’t this the greedy corporate mentality we have been seeing more and more of?  If you don’t believe me than Google “Forbes HP Hurd” and read this article about how Hewlett Packard’s CEO is being paid $28 million to go away.  Are we out of control or what?

Watch Out for these New Tricks

Unfortunately I can’t list all of the tricks the credit card companies are using but this will give you some idea of what they are trying to pull.

If you receive something in the mail that talks about a “professional card” be very careful before you decide to accept the issuer’s offer.  These new “professional cards” aren’t covered under the new credit card law.

Also watch out for the new “rebate card” were you will get a rebate on your finance charges if you pay on time.  The trick is that rebate offers aren’t covered by the new credit card law and the credit card issuer can revoke them without warning and hit you with high fees.

Watch out for the increase in “balance transfer” fees.  In some cases the transfer fee was more than doubled… from 2% of the outstanding balance transferred to 5% of the balance transferred.

Warn your kids about “low-credit-limit-cards” and the upfront fees the credit card issuers are charging.  These fees are exorbitant and can cause your child to overdraw their card the first time they use it causing additional fees to be charged to their account.

I have only briefly highlighted four areas to be aware of.  There are more and the never ending negative creativity of the credit card issuers will guarantee that more than ever you had better read the fine print on your credit card statements.

It makes you wonder why we continue to put up with this crap and our elected legislators never seem to fix any of the problems we have to continually deal with.  I guess greed rules in this country and we can accept it and move on or try and do something about it at the voting booth.

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