The so called ‘Durbin Amendment’ passed by congress last year, limits the amount of interchange fees (or swipe fees) that credit card companies can charge retailers. Because of this, several big credit card companies (Chase, Citi, Bank of America) are retaliating. These major creditors are considering capping debit card use to $50 or $100 for transactions. [...]
Credit card interest rates are SOARING to all-time new highs according to this week’s report by CNN (found HERE). The average interest rates for plastic are now hovering around 15%. If your credit is poor however, you can pay dearly. In fact, credit challenged consumers with low scores can be expected to pay ridiculous rates, up [...]
Black Friday deals, sleeping in tents outside big box retailers, stampeding department stores. It’s all part of the holiday rush to find a deal. There are some deals however that should definitely be avoided. This year, bargain hunters are faced with a very tempting offer. Credit card companies are offering rewards to cardholders that use credit [...]
It seems debt collectors and debt collection agencies are getting more tech savvy these days. In the past, collectors would use things like ’skip-tracing’, personal investigations, phone records, and utility bills to find you. Their job seems to be getting easier now with the advent of social media. Facebook, My Space, Linked In and Twitter are [...]
Credit card companies are losing billions due to the newly enacted Credit Card Accountability Responsibility and Disclosure Act. In an effort to recoup some of these losses, companies are offering ‘business’ credit cards to individual consumers. Why? Because the new laws do not affect business credit cards. Credit card companies are ’skirting’ around the new [...]
Despite all the new regulations imposed by the government, credit card companies still somehow manage to squeeze consumers for every penny. If you have credit card debt, you know what we mean. There are still pitfalls, traps, and tricks credit card companies use, especially now, to make up for lost revenue. Consumer Reports recently published [...]
Ok, for all you folks thinking you’re safe out there with credit cards and the deceptive practices of creditors, here’s one more example of how they put consumers deeper into debt. And they like to keep it that way for obvious reasons. The U.S. Justice Department and seven US states are suing Visa, Mastercard and American [...]
We’ve talked before about the threatening and abusive practices that some credit card debt collection agencies use. This story made abc headlines recently. If you have the stomach for it, the entire video and transcript can be viewed HERE. This time, it was a major creditor who hired this particular debt collection agency. [...]
The latest reports are in. Graduating students owe approximately $23,000 in student loan debt on average. This translates into over $830 billion dollars in student loan debt nationally. Compare that to the just over $825 billion in credit card debt and we have a winner! Not really. You see, any federally funded student loan debt cannot [...]
Last week was a bad week for the credit card giant Chase. Plagued with online services problems, their internet commerce site went down on Monday night September 13, 2010 and was out all day Tuesday the following day. Chase reported that their site was available again on Wednesday for customer access but online users were greeted [...]
