More Why I Hate Credit Card Companies

As if I need any further reasons, here’s some more…

A Chuck Jaffe reader received a notice similar to the one I did this weekend. [tag]MBNA[/tag] (oh, have I mentioned that [tag]MBNA sucks[/tag] lately? not today, so there’s your notice… ) dropped into the mail a nice 5-page, double-sided, microprinted ‘improvement’ to my [tag]credit card[/tag] agreement. I combed through it fairly agressively, looking especially for an announcement of a yearly fee or some such nonsense as I haven’t charged a penny on it for over a year and have held a balance of precisely zero for half of that. Figured they’ve been itching for some of my money, you know… But no, no annual fee – just some tweaking by jumping up charges for late payments, balance transfers, third-Tuesday-after-a-full-moon [tag]fees[/tag], etc. Oh, and for whatever reason, tacking on another 1.3% to my interest rate to boost it to 26.29%. Must say, they’re really tempting me to use that card, I can tell you that!

Oh, sure, I could call them and likely get them to lower that rate from the stratosphere, but I don’t really care to waste my time doing so – I’m never using the card again, since they arbitrarily throw it back to that level whenever they damn well please. So I’ll just keep them on the books to decrease the credit utilization portion of my credit score

And then to top that off, I stumbled across an item from Frank at Investor Geeks that I’ve yet to see in my mailbox. [tag]Universal Savings Bank[/tag] apparently is offering a free laptop for signing up with their credit card, assuming you meet a few simple terms. Like, say, taking out a $5,000 transfer on opening the account. Oh, and then holding at least a $3,500 balance for 18 months or be considered in default (how does that make any damn sense?). Oh, yeah, did I mention that $600 [tag]early payment penalty[/tag]!

I can’t wait to get every one of these things off my books!

[tags]predatory lending[/tags]