Paying Up

We are coming upon the season of jolly and happiness. The buying and receiving of gifts.  The USA has become more commercialized than ever before so be careful with your spending.  Many consumers are choosing to use credit cards to purchase all their christmas gifts. Some people even max out their credit cards.

This is a lite season so it calls for this lite topic.  Before you get carried away in the use of your credit cards, let me share a little information that you may not know.  All year long many people are overly concern about the credit score.  Spending more than 50% of the balance of your credit limit on credit cards causes lower  FICO scores and can decrease your credit worthiness.  Keep in mind our last discission on universal default.  

My advice is not to spend more money than you can afford on christmas.  This mistake could cause you much more money than is worth.  Avoid using credit cards for cash advances.  Check your interest rate for cash advances it may be much higher than your purchases interest rate.  If you can’t afford to pay the minimum payment plus the interest incurred each month, you are headed into financial trouble.  Money spends quickly but take time and hardwork to earn it. Ho Ho Ho until next year and MERRY CHRISTMAS! Or HAPPY HOLIDAYS!!!!!!!

The past few weeks has had many developments. I promise to continue our discussion on contracts.
This weeks chat is about your contracts with financial institutions. Universal default - do you know what this is?
Allow me to briefly explain. If you have a credit card with a company, when you are late paying your other bills,
they have the write to increase your interest rate up 25 - 30% and it is legal. 

People on the internet scam people as a practice so you look for those scams. nontheless, you need to watch those you do business everyday more closely.  You need to watch your financial companies.  When they send to all of your legal literature read it.  The law only state they only have notify you 30 days before they start enforcing a change in policy.  I had a credit card with interest rate of 7%,  jump to 15% all at once. I call the company about the increase, they notified me of the up coming increase two months before.

I went back two months, surely, they made notice of the increase but I had read the complete phamplet because it was buried at the end of the other information design to confuse the consumer. The contracts we sign give companies the right to change policies at any point in time. This is a scam.