re: #61 MrPaulRevere

Credit card reform becomes opportunity to hammer good customers: [Link: www.latimes.com…]

Yeah, exactly what I predicted a few weeks ago. Congress is giving the banks until next year to get in compliance with their “reform” package, and in response the banks will use that time to completely rejigger their credit card agreements to screw their customers out of as much money as possible and get the contract changes grandfathered in before the new regulations kick in. And of course, customer like you and me - the ones who never carry a balance, and pay their card off on time or early - are the ones most likely to be screwed. We’re not the ones the banks are making money off of.

One upside: since I carry a zero balance from month to month, switching companies is trivially easy. It’s still easy to find other banks who will take a balance transfer and issue a “teaser” rate of a couple percent for a year or so on the transfer amount, so what I might do is make a large purchase on the card that’s pissing me off, then immediately yank the balance away from them, then pay the balance off long before the teaser expires, depriving all the banks involved of profit.

Or, I could go back to using cash or checks. Just not very convenient.

Keep a close eye on the mail these bastards send you. They will be doing everything they can to jack their rates and terms around on you in the coming months. Especially since we will be seeing a wave of credit card defaults start to wash over the economy over the next six months or so.