50% - 70%!! Fat Tony never had it so good!
applies
Do they get bonus miles?
Out of curiosity what *do * UK dopers pay in “normal” CC interest rates? For people in the US with decent credit it hovers around 9-12% in the US for fixed rates, and goes up to 24% or so for higher risk users. If you’ve got great credit you make use of zero percent or super low (1-3%) introductory rate offers, but you have to be in and out of those quicky as they only last about 3-6 months (although some are longer - up to 12 months).
That is about the same we pay in the UK plus 1 or 2 percentage points .So 9 to 15 %is the norm. There are introductory offers of zero or very low rates for the first six months as well. There are also cards issued by various department stores which are much higher ( up to 30%) . They lure you in with an offer of something like 20% off your first purchase from the store and special “member’s promotions” . But , if you don’t pay off the balance you get hit with those high charges. Most of these store cards seem to be managed by GE finance and are the subject of an ongoing government enquiry into their trading methods.
About the same. I have a regular card that currently charges 12.3% and a “platinum” one that is currently 6.9%. But because I almost never pay any interest on either of them, other factors come into play, like annual fees, price protection etc.
I was reading about shady CC companies in the US and they raise your rates if you are late with a payment.
Even if the payment was for soemthing other than the card.
So if you pay your phone bill a day late your credit card intrest rate goes up to 29%.
We don’t get that but many CC companies will slap on a “late Payment fee” of something like £15. Many people are caught out by this because , for some strange reason, it can take up to 7 working days for your cheque to wend its way through the banking system. This in the age of instant , electronic transfers.
In the United States there are even worse scams. “Payday loan” places charge some $20 for a $255 15 day loan. There are “title loan” places that will lend money to people with a car title, typically about 10% of the value of the car. They then charge as much as 20% per month in interest, take the car if the loan isn’t payed off, and continue to harass the client to reclaim a loan balance that can quickly reach 10 times the original balance.
Most CC companies don’t care about your phone bills. It’s more about being late with other cards, not utilities. Not that it doesn’t still suck, but not as much as it could. Like it is impossible for me to pay my cable bill on time, as I get it about three days before it’s due.
falls over laughing
This isn’t just shady ones any more. I get a LOT of credit card offers in the mail; and I’d say more than half of them now have the “we can raise your rate if you’re late on a payment to ANYBODY” clause.
They go in the trash immediately, along with the ones that will raise your rate without warning for a single late payment – over a long enough period of time, even careful people might have a payment lost in the mail.
I get 3-5 card offers a week, I can afford to be choosy even at the rare times I’m looking for a new card.
I’m just not going to play the game anymore.
I’ve got two credit cards- one is to the gas station that I use on long trips, and which I pay off every month, and the other is a secured card which I only use for car rental. My truck’s paid off, and the only money I owe is on my house.
Credit card companies aren’t even trying to appear reputable any longer. It’s getting pretty effin’ ridiculous, if you ask me.
Well… yes and no. If a credit card company wants to carry a $ 10,000 balance for me at somewhere between zero to two percent for 6 months to a year on the premise that I’m going to trip up, that’s a bet I might be willing to make with them. I currently have my balances down to piddly couple thousand, but my income is commission based and somewhat variable, and in the not too distant past when I was carrying much larger amounts, the low interest incentive rates were great.
All this is predicated on having golden credit. I have called CC companies and politely threatened to pull my balance if they didn’t lower the rate as I was staring at a better offer from another card, and often (not always) they would “find” a better rate for me. Some of my associates told me to go belly up financially when I got divorced ten years ago and was having severe cash flow difficulties, and let the card companies chase me. I decided not to and worked hard to get my debts paid off in timely manner. For almost two years in the mid 90’s I lived (to a large extent) off my cards, and kept rolling the balances down to more and more favorable teaser rates as time went by and kicked out of those before the teaser rate expired.
So yes, CC can be a great evil and temptation, but if you can skate inside the lines they can also be a great benefit, but you can’t afford to fall, and they are thinking of ever more clever ways to trip you up.
It reminds of an A.A. Milne verse
The key point here is that this vicious card is aimed at people who find it difficult to get credit anywhere else.
There is plenty of credit for people with a reasonable income. As a teacher, I have obtained a mortgage, bank overdraft and credit cards easily. (In fact I continually get regular offers to borrow money.)
I don’t use the overdraft (it’s just a precaution) and always pay my credit card off in full. So the credit card company keep raising my limit!
But if you are a low income family, you may have difficulty getting bank credit (or perhaps be embarrassed trying). So instead you get loan sharks coming to your door, offering some cash in hand. However the agreement you sign has ludicrous interest payments - the idea is to keep you in debt forever.
It is appalling that the Government won’t make such interest charges illegal.