On Fri, Feb 20, 2009 at 5:57 PM, Bhairitu <noozg...@sbcglobal.net> wrote:
> Last Saturday the local consumer reporter, Michael Finney, on his weekly > radio show (KGO) mentioned that his Citibank credit card APR had gone > way up after someone had mentioned theirs had gone up to 28%. So I dug > my latest bill out and sure enough mine had gone from around 13% to > 18%. Guess who's card isn't going to get used anymore? > > I lived through 18 years of the Great Depression. My family, nuclear and extended, told me about the Great Depression with many, many reruns. Of course they didn't bother to remind me that farm folk always had enough to eat and enough to wear even if they didn't have enough money. So, I buy a car every few years and make payments on it to keep a credit rating. Other than that, I've followed my family's approach: don't buy if you can't afford to buy with cash, including houses. I remember years ago the threat from the credit card companies that they'd start charging me an extra fee (there were no free credit cards then) because I paid off my balance in full. Well, I went to the mailbox yesterday and there were all these advisories that this and that credit card was raising fees and interest rates on me, despite the fact that I have never carried a credit card balance. Included were checks. Dozens of checks. Checks that I could use to draw down on my lines of credit or pay off my non-existent balance on another card account. Logic.
