Credit Me This

I was just reading an article from last week's Washington Post about whats going on with credit cards. In a nutshell, it comes down to 'the card companies are looking for any reason to charge you more money. Any reason at all.' Reasons include the ones you'd consider reasonable, and then theres ones like 'you shop at a store where people frequently don't pay their bills on time', 'you live in an area where there have been multiple home foreclosures', 'you refused to pay for something on one credit card, so a different credit card is going to charge you more interest'.

We don't pay interest. Each month, we look at the bill that's coming (we go to the credit card company's site to see it before its even mailed out), checking how much its for and when it will be due. We mark on a calendar on the laptop when it's due, and then we back up a week and pay it then, transferring it electronically from my checking account. (That last bit came after we came this close to missing a payment once, when we used to mail in the payments, thought 'well, we can just pay electronically', and found that there's a fairly big fee to do that on the due date.) We use the card for routine purchases, and also to automatically pay some recurring bills -- utilities, cable, that sort of thing - but we don't use the credit card for anything else -- no cash transfers, none of that. We don't pay any fees, either. We'd actually be willing to pay one, because the convenience is helpful. We're not going to volunteer to do it, but if we learn that we're going to have to pay a fee because we use their service and never pay interest, that'd be okay. I figure, the way things are going, we're due.

I understand that for years Democrats have wanted to impose more stringent regulations on credit card companies, so that they cannot increase interest rates when someone misses a payment -- missing is bad, I agree, but the logic of you couldn't pay that so we're going to charge you more has never made sense to me. The vigorous Congressional Interface Service Agents (aka lobbyists) for the card issuers have successfully fought that off, thus far. I'd actually like to hear someone defend that practice -- I could use a laugh.

Now, with a Democratic administration coming in -- we'll see how that goes. My guess is, not too well.