Changes for the Better in Credit Card Regulation
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credit: Logan Antill
Many people believe that credit card companies have been irresponsible in their dealings with customers, and that fewer people would have large credit card debts if the companies acted somewhat more responsibly. Of course, they are only making business decisions, but the Federal Reserve has started talking about new regulations that would help credit card customers avoid overwhelming debts. Some of these regulations include:
- Stopping credit card companies from raising interest rates unless there is a really good reason (right now they can pretty much do whatever they want).
- Requiring credit card companies to send you your bill earlier, so that you have a longer time to prepare to pay the bill - they could extend the 14 day minimum to 21 days. High fees for late payments are often the result of just not having enough time to pay the bill.
- Insisting that payments made to credit card debts are used to pay down both high and low interest rate portions of your debt - at the moment, many credit companies will add your monthly payments against the lowest interest rate debt, and that means the debt you have with the higher interest rate just keeps getting larger and larger.
- Abolishing the two-cycle billing system, because that’s been charging customers who usually pay the bill in full, but occasionally don’t, much higher interest than is really fair.
Tags: Credit & Debit Cards | Debt Management | Finances | Saving Money
This entry was posted on Monday, June 16th, 2008 at 2:30 pm and is filed under Credit & Debit Cards. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
