Dead on

I especially enjoy how, if you're a day late in your payment, the credit card company will double your interest rate, apply it retroactively, AND charge you a penalty. To "help" you out with this, they'll move their P.O. Box around the country in the hope that your payment will arrive later, or, if you're too responsible, mail you your bill fewer and fewer days before it's due, or "forget" to mail it at all. Whoops. Not to mention encouraging people who've just turned 18 to get credit cards with reasonable introductory rates but then insane interest rates later and ludicrously high credit limits. Got to start 'em off young if you want to have them in your clutches for life.

/me waits patiently for the "bootstraps" devil's advocate brigade.

This is why I never got a credit card until I got my current bank account with a debit/credit card. I am never charging more than what I have in my bank account, and the only thing I have bought on credit I am STILL paying off, though it was a car, and therefore should cost a fair amount of time to cover.

Still, I am 2 payments ahead, and planning to drop a massive amount of money into the loan near Christmas to increase the speed with which I will own my Boxy Cleopatra.

Debt is great, IF you can handle it. This often means adjusting your quality of life somehow to compensate for the lack of income. Many people across the USA, and in some other countries to a certain degree, lack the discipline to do so. That is why we fail.

Our system is set up so that having no credit is history is as bad as having a horrible one.

The problem is that credit card companies purposefully seek out people they know -- the young, the poorly educated, the poor -- can't handle it and intentionally trap and exploit them. NOT using credit is not an option in today's society unless you want to live like the Unibomber. The credit card companies know this, and they exploit it to a predatory degree.

Even people who CAN handle it can get stuck in a situation they can't get out of. So many, many people have been forced to choose between, for example, not having emergency health care and prescriptions -- because of our broken health care system -- or paying for it on credit. The costs and the interest and the fees add up too fast for them to ever get out of it, and they're trapped.

If you can't even imagine a situation like this that a responsible, intelligent person can get themselves into where they have no other choice, then you've been far too sheltered in your life.

There's two kinds of people that drive me nuts in message board discussions. One is the kind of person who always sides with, for lack of a better term, "The Man": government, the military, the police, corporations. Two is the kind of person with no sympathy for people who aren't as lucky, privileged, or intelligent as they are and expect everyone to never make mistakes and to always perfectly foresee every possible problem and always plan accordingly. "What do you mean you didn't plan on your wife developing breast cancer at 27 and acquire full health insurance and $400,000 in savings while you were in high school? Pfft. No sympathy for you, slacker. Go die in a ditch."

It's not just credit cards. My bank, the company I have my mortgage with, my student loans and a lot of other shit do pretty much the same things. I've been making regular payments to these parasites for years, but when things get tight and I can't make one, it's not "Oh that's OK, we'll give you a break this time. Just get it to us when you've got it.." No, I get a late charge that usually adds about $40 to $50 to the original amount! I see people just leaving their houses left and right and getting away with it! I keep on paying my mortgage and what do I get? Bullshit and penalties...

Yeah, but have you seen that Jack in the Box commercial where all the midgets are singing "Yippie kay yay, mini sirloin burgers"? America is still great.

Not only did Babylonians outlaw usury. They also forgave all debts when a new ruler came to power. The Bible has something similar, with the Year of Jubilees. The ancients understood that you couldn't just let debt accumulate forever.

this addresses loan and interest practices at the bottom end--the consumer end. it's also important to address unregulated practices at the top end. the inflationary activities are insane; we've got a $500 trillion bomb that, if dropped, will knock our economy off a cliff.

You forgot the part where banks create new money out of nothing when they give out loans. Then charge interest on it.

It makes me sad when I tell people they shouldn't shop at Wal-Mart. "But it's cheeeeaaap!"

Word!

Thanks to my divorce last year and my ex-wife being an asshole, I'm heading into the terminal credit shitter. I just had a angry discussion with American Express because I paid my last statement balance in full, then got a bill for $71 dollars for the finance charges that accrued between the statement closing date at the due date of the payment. When I called to complain, the first thing they told me was "by the way, did you know that your card and account were cancelled on the 30th?"

I find it aggravating that I've gotten letters from most of my credit cards saying that they are raising rates because "the cost of doing business is getting higher". Awesome. We're in a tremendous financial crisis, causing people to have a difficult time paying their bills, and these fucking assholes are just making it harder so MORE people can default. Plus, we've given the banks BILLIONS of dollars to help with the mortgage crisis, yet the banks are making it near impossible to get one.

I hate to say it, since they'll probably fuck it up more, but we need the government to step in and re-regulate the banking industry.

Well put...Interesting spin and new information for me~!

enacted in stages, i really think less credit would be a very good thing. there has been far, far too much spending on credit at all levels of the economy.

the trouble will be preventing banks and lending agencies from doing exactly what they did with the bailout money. how anybody can view supply-side economics as a panacea after that fiasco is utterly beyond me.