The Eighty Percent APR Credit Card. You Heard Me! 80%!!

The BBQ Pit
#1

http://www.walletpop.com/blog/2009/10/16/such-a-deal-new-credit-card-offers-a-mere-79-9-interest/

(Several other reports are available, this one chosen merely by way of Google dominance…)

(Obligatory Thread Placement Disclaimer: Maybe this isn’t Pit Worthy, but it makes me want to scream and curse, so I’m thinking Pit…)

Are you fucking kidding me! You guys smoking guitar picks again! What insanity stalks our grey halls of finance, what madness bursts like the Alien aborning from their swollen porcine flesh? What is this shit? What is this shit? What is this shit?

“Its an opportunity for someone with less than perfect credit to build up his/her credit rating by performing responsibly and baring their throat so that we can drain the last drop of blood from their body…”

(Read that last imagining a barracuda in a three-piece suit batting big brown eyes with frantic innocence…) What is this shit?

Do these guys have to pass drug tests, every once in a while? Do they have the occasional MRI on their collective crania, to see if maybe brain weevils have burrowed in and are dining with weevilish abandon on their lobia? (That’s lobia, with an “o”. Stop that!)

I’ve been listening to these guys for years, about how they are all about being hard-headed, realistic, not given to flights of fancy like yours truly, level headed men. OK, so I’ve seen UFOs and had telepathic conversations with cats (a lot less interesting than you might think, by the way…), but never, ever have I come up with anything so brain-dead scratch-butt stupid as this.

Is someone slipping powder Novocain in their coffee? If I stuck them in the cheek with a pub dart, would they flinch?

(All right, time to 'fess up. It wasn’t really eighty percent, its only seventy-nine point nine…)

#2

http://resources.lawinfo.com/en/Articles/Credit-Card-Gift-Card-and-E-payments/Federal/south-dakota-a-favorite-state-for-credit-card.html

#3

If that’s their premier card, I’d hate to say what interest rates they give to their normal customers.

#4

The interest rate is surviveable if you pay the card off each month. But look at the fees!

It looks like just by opening the card you get hit with $29 + $95 + $48 + $7 = $179! Come on. An annual fee and a monthly fee? A ‘program fee’? How is that different from an annual fee?

I always thought there was a tacit philosophy that a financial institution could make its money from user fees, or from interest. These guys look like they want both pies and most of the rest of the buffet as well.

#5

They are trying to have the American people pay off their huge losses in home lending. Not unlike auto insurance, if you get in an accident your rates go up so high ,they get their money back quickly. Then the rates stay high because you are now a person with a blemished record.

#6

Well, let’s put it this way.

The credit card company is free to offer such a card, and everyone else is free to tell them to get bent.

Except the problem is that only retards will accept such a card. Pretty much by definition. And I believe that while our society has a moral obligation to let competant adults enter into whatever agreements they wish, we also have a moral obligation to protect the retarded.

So, since this sort of card preys only on the mentally defective, my libertarian impulses are overcome by my well ordered society impulses.

#7

You see, there are customers, and said customers go to the bank for the aforementioned services. but here’s the catch- nobody is forcing them to do so. They do so of their own free will.

If, in the year 2009, you dive in and get a credit card (or a payday loan, or a loan from a place like Wells Fargo) and you didn’t look at the fees and the interest rate, you are an unspeakable moron.

Wait, strike all that. What I meant to say was that the greedy banks are gouging the little guy who doesn’t know any better because he can’t read or something like that.

Caveat emptor and all that.

#8

Oh, and since I’m sure that I’m on the wrong side of this one, as usual, I will claim credit for the above post. Might as well put the abuse where it belongs.

#9

I moved to England 3 years ago. Since then I’ve paid all my bills and never had a single issue with any kind of defaulting or non-payment. I have a few joint bills in my name and they’re all paid on time and have been for all three years I’ve been up here. In America I had 2 credit cards with about a $5,000 credit line and a high credit rating. My interest was a non-variable 13.9% though it didn’t really matter as I paid my balance every month. In England I’ve flat been turned down for every credit card I’ve applied for. Hell I struggled to get a bank account DEBIT card ON MY WIFE’S account. Yes her bank refused to make me a joint account holder first time we tried to put me on there. They did allow me to joint open some super crappy no interest savings account and after I held that a year they reconsidered and allowed me to be put on my own wife’s account.

I’m desperate to establish credit up here but nobody is willing to give me a card. I finally have some crappy 39% interest credit card who didn’t turn me down instantly ‘considering’ me. They phoned me on Monday (I guess to verify I didn’t make my phone number up) and they still haven’t approved me. They told me they’d get back to me by the end of the week. I don’t even want this damn card but it’s the crappiest one I can find that doesn’t charge a monthly fee. I’m a non-entity credit-wise up here and I have to take what I can get or come time for me and my wife to get a house loan or put my name on a car loan they’ll turn us down or totally screw us with interest fees.

I can read. I know I’m getting screwed. I have no choice in the matter (also it appears my American credit cards have CXL’d me not that it matters I hadn’t used them in three years).

#10

This is all true, but it seems like sometimes we need to do things to protect morons from themselves.

#11

Don’t worry too much about it, Doors. There looks to be a lot of bemusement about the thought processes of whoever would sign up for the product.

What do you say to the argument that the act of signing up for this is prima facie evidence that the putative cardholder is not mentally competent to enter into legally binding contracts?

#12

This is awesome! I can use it to pay off my 140% APR loan from CashCall!

#13

No, the smart consumer will use a payday loan for that purpose.

#14

This kinda free market thinking is great when looked at in isolation. However it is products like these and people who used them who when packaged up into large groups caused the clusterfuck the whole world is in at the moment.

#15

Well, the thing is that if something had to be learned from the latest Happy Global Economic Meltdown is that sometimes we need to do things to protect morons so the consequences of their stupid decisions don’t drag us all down with them.

#16

Initial fees of ~$200 are pretty much standard for these “credit builder” accounts.

#17

This needs to be repeated. Bolded and in 20 point font.
This kind of free market thinking is great when looked at in isolation. However it is products like these and the people who used them who, when packaged up into large groups, caused the clusterfuck the whole world is in at the moment.
And yet the proponents of unfettered free market still insist that the entities that perpetrate these ‘products’ are ‘too big to fail’ and need bailouts to prevent the world from collapsing into chaos. It’s a self-propagating wonderland for the pirates that dominate the economy. If we’d had proper regulation and enforcement to begin with, we wouldn’t be in this mess. But no, regulation is fascism, socialism, communism, and anti-American.

#18

Perhaps we need some sort of legal designation for some of our citizens, to mark them as “fair game” and available for any sort of victimizing that a greed shriveled mind can cook up.

#19

I mean, if you’re walking along the shore, and you hear a plaintive cry for help from someone drowning, you have several considerations. How might this person have behaved more responsibly, more intellilgently? Should they have learned to swim better, should they have not strayed so far from shore? And, of course, what’s in it for me?

#20

That’s your problem. Moving across the Atlantic wipes out your credit. When I moved to the US from the UK, I had exactly the same problem. Zero credit history. Even though Equifax (a credit agency) operates in both the UK and the US, they can’t or won’t talk to each other.

Add that to the UKs struggling banking system and you’re going to get screwed over. I suspect you know this already.