With the current and upcoming changes in the credit card industry due to the Credit CARD Act and other regulations put in place by the Federal Reserve, banks and credit issuers are maneuvering as much as possible to be in a good position to continue making money off their customers. Public corporations have responsibility to their shareholders to protect their bottom line, and with the threat of reduced profits due to new regulations you can be sure these companies will try anything within the realm of possibility to survive.
Bank of America has announced some anticipated changes to their credit cards that shows what the future might look like: more credit cards will carry annual fees. These new fees, according to the bank, will range from $29 to $99. And unlike most fee-bearing credit cards, the customers receiving these charges may not have cards that offer premium services like a concierge or extensive rewards.
One of the criteria Bank of America will use to determine which customers are lucky enough to receive the fee is “profitability;” in other words, those of us who don’t send the bank extra in the forms of interest payments and late fees or those who use their credit card infrequently — the responsible users of credit — are likely to be assessed the fee. Bank of America could easily determine which customers are not profitable for the company and charge this annual fee to make them profitable.
For now, there are many fee-free credit card choices for responsible users. The climate might change soon, however. Even the most diligent credit card users, those who manage to use cash back rewards and other benefits while paying off their balance in full every month, might find that the new environment will point to a cash-only spending plan for the best deal.
For a few years, Credit Karma has been offering a product that lets consumers see what lenders and employers see when they look at the consumers’ credit reports. After securely and privately providing your personal information, Credit Karma retrieves your credit report from one of the credit reporting bureaus, either Experian, Equifax, or TransUnion.
Credit Karma then analyzes your details and assigns a grade, A through F. The various categories receiving grades relate to the items that determine your credit score. Lenders review these items when deciding whether to extend credit to you, how much credit to extend, and at what cost.
This is a free service, supported by advertising.
Yesterday, Credit.com announced they will also be offering a similar free service, providing a credit report card to help you evaluate and improve your credit report.
So which service is better? I took both services for test drives.
Credit report cards
Here are some of the most obvious differences. Credit.com assigns grades to the following categories: Payment history, debt usage, credit age, account mix, and inquiries. Credit Karma’s categories are similar: Open credit card utilization, percent of on-time payments, average age of open credit lines, total accounts, hard credit inquiries, total debt, and debt-to-income ratio. More categories, and therefore more information, is more helpful.
To look further into the health of my credit, Credit Karma offers charts in each category, placing my result within the spectrum of results from the Credit Karma Community, all users of the website. So I can see, for example, that the grade of “C” Credit Karma gave me for “Total Accounts,” which includes how those accounts are divided among revolving credit accounts and loans, puts me in a group of users who received an average score of 683, significantly lower than my score.
This tells me I’m doing well enough in the other categories to make up for this deficit but improving my mix of accounts will improve my score further.
I also received a grade of “C” from Credit.com for the “Credit Mix” category. Credit.com doesn’t offer a chart, but it does include details about my types of credit (23 revolving credit accounts, 0 mortgage loans, 1 auto loan, 6 student loans) and excellent suggestions for specific actions I can take to improve in this category.
Here are some screen shots. Click on the thumbnails to see the full-size images. [click to continue…]
If you’re an AAA member in California, Hawaii, New Mexico or Texas, you’re suddenly eligible for a free credit monitoring service, provided by Experian.
While I was looking through the fine print (a free service for you provided by ConsumerismCommentary.com), I found this, which gave me pause:
You are receiving a complimentary credit monitoring membership. Your membership is effective for the period disclosed to you when you received your activation code. Should you choose to discontinue your membership for any reason before expiration of the then applicable membership term for which you are entitled, you may cancel your membership by calling the toll-free number listed on this Web Site or the toll-free number listed in the welcome materials sent to you. Please be aware that if, at the end of your promotional membership, you decide to continue your membership for a monthly/annual fee, you will have an opportunity to re-enroll at a separate website with different Terms and Conditions.
But the e-mail I got from AAA stated:
This benefit is complimentary to AAA members—there are no hidden fees or charges. You won’t be asked to provide any payment information when you sign up.
There was an offer along the way to see my credit score for $5, but I’m happily using the free CreditKarma service for that.
When it was all done, there was a big button labeled “View Credit Report”, which isn’t the same as “identity theft monitoring”, but for all of our sakes, I clicked it. Thankfully, there was a menu option (all the way at the top, very small font) for “Credit Monitoring”. Here’s what you actually get:
Daily Monitoring of your Experian Credit Report
Email Alerts of key changes to your Experian Credit Report
Dedicated Representatives for Identity Theft Victims
Experian Credit Report
I love e-mail alerts, so I’ll be keeping this on for a while, and I’ll report back on its usefulness.
Frequent readers know all about how a depressed economy and new laws are serving as convenient excuses for banks to be raising interest rates and otherwise penalizing clients, even those who pose no risk.
Ann Minch was presented with multiple notices of an interest rate hike. Even though she says she’s never missed a payment, she ended up with a 30% interest rate on her Bank of America credit card. She decided she’d had enough and started a protest in a simple YouTube video. YouTube videos are increasingly proving to be a successful way of getting the attention of a corporate behemoth that has wronged you. And it worked for Ann Minch.
Bank of America responded to her revolt, and because she was armed with knowledge and the right attitude, they finally agreed to set her interest rate back to its previous 12.99%. Many of our readers have found in similar situations that persisting with customer service, asking for as many supervisors as you have to, is often successful as well.
Ann explains in the video that she’s starting a new Web site to make the Debtor’s Revolt larger and more effective.
Interestingly, she also hints at a plan to avoid some tax increases, but isn’t very specific. I’d be curious to know what she’s referring to. Assuming she’s talking about federal taxes, I don’t know of any current proposals to raise taxes. In fact the current administration has lowered taxes for 98.6% of working households. The Bush tax cuts are meant to expire next year, but I’m not sure to what extent that will affect most people. Hopefully she’ll be more specific about that in the future.
After we got married, my wife and I combined our finances. We moved most of our money from a local brick and mortar bank to a bank that we primarily access online and over the phone.
This arrangement has worked out well for us, but it does mean some accounts that were previously utilized many times a week have now lain dormant for quite a while. We’re not really too worried about the checking and savings account, but we do keep a close eye on the credit card from that bank.
The card is important to us because not only is it the largest line of credit we have available to us (we rent, have no student loans and no car loan), but it’s also been open the longest – it has a major affect on my wife’s credit score.
With the recent increase in banks closing customers’ cards, we started to worry that our card would mysteriously one day disappear, since we don’t use it very much.
According to this recent article from the Wall Street Journal, while ’surprise’ card cancelations are on the rise, there are risk factors and other things you can be aware of that might help you keep that card in your wallet.
From the article:
“An issuer can cancel a credit-card account without notice when …
* A customer hasn’t used the card in more than a year.
* A customer has defaulted or is delinquent on the account.
An issuer can cancel an account and send written notice within 30 days after the cancellation when a reassessment deems the cardholder too risky.”
In fact, your bank doesn’t even have to notify you about the account closure if your account is closed based on inactivity, default, or late payments. Many people find out about the cancelation only after their card is turned away at a store or restaurant.
So what can we do to keep our cards and avoid damage to our credit scores?
- Pay attention: Double check your bills to make sure you’re not late or in default. Monitor your credit report to make sure it’s accurate, and do all you can to fix any problems.
- Use your card: We use our card for the occasional entertainment expense. Interesting enough, despite hardly using the card over the past few months, our credit limit was increased, helping us our with our credit score. Having a set plan for a card (a small recurring bill or a determined budget category) will help keep the card active.
- Diversify: After reading the article, I realized that even if we do everything we can to keep that card active, we’d really be hurting if it was ever closed. We need another option that will reduce the overall impact of a card closure on our score. Granted, the impact won’t be as bad for someone with a mortgage or student loans, but when a credit card is the only credit you’ve had time to get, it could be a whopper.
I’m much more comfortable now that I know we’re working to keep the card open. I now know that we need to diversify to decrease the impact that each source of credit has on our credit score. Knowing what’s going on with your cards can help preserve your hard financial work and can prevent surprises at the check out stand as well.
Nevertheless, Discover continues sending notifications of terms changes, balance transfer checks, and new cards requiring activation, all to encourage me to use their service. I received one from Discover today, even though I haven’t used my Discover Miles Card in several years.
Here is the summary of the changes.
Discover will no longer increase the interest rate on existing balances if I pay late or exceed my credit limit, but the interest rate on new purchases may increase to a Default Rate if I miss a payment.
The card is moving from a “fixed” interest rate to a higher variable rate for purchases: the Prime Rate + 9.74%.
The same is true for cash advances. The new variable rate for these transactions is Prime rate + 20.74%. (Yikes!)
The credit card company is using the grace period differently. They will not use new purchases to calculate the amount of interest due as long as I pay my credit card bills on time.
The notification included four pages on fine print, but none of these changes will affect me personally unless I need to use this credit card. I expect my other credit card issuers will send similar notifications soon, but even the new regulations for the cards I use will not affect me much because I charge only what I can pay off by the time the bill is due and pay off my entire balance at that point.
There is always a possibility that I experience a severe emergency for which I have insufficient cash. If for some reason I do need to carry a balance from one month to the next, I would prefer to fully understand the many ways in which I will be punished by the credit card industry.
The improvement of the grace period and the elimination of double-cycle billing are two aspects of the new credit card regulations that benefit consumers. Some of these changes, such as the elimination of double-cycle billing, won’t go into effect until February 2010.
My girlfriend is an elementary school teacher in the New York City public schools. One of the benefits of her employment is the reimbursement for the purchase of supplies and materials used in her class. Any teacher will tell you that they are required to pay for many of their own materials, and the amount of the reimbursement is subject to a maximum that never covers their full expenses.
The reimbursements until recently were distributed via check, an old-fashioned method of payment. More recently, the City of New York switched to prepaid Visa debit cards, offered by Chase Bank. This must be the result of some sort of a deal between the city and the bank because it does not make much sense for the employee.
Debit cards are meant to be used for spending, but these reimbursements take place after the spending is completed. If you want to use the reimbursements to pay yourself back for your spending on items for the classroom, you must visit a Chase branch to convert the card to cash. We tried taking the debit card to her personal bank of choice, TD Bank, but they claimed to be unable to do anything for us with the debit card.
These prepaid debit cards seem to be the latest trend for rebates. Verizon Wireless, the cellular carrier of choice for both me and my girlfriend, offers rebates on a number of its phones. The last time she needed to purchase a new phone, the rebate came not in the form of a check as it had on prior occasions, but in the form of a prepaid debit card. These cards are touted for their “convenience,” but absent direct deposit I would prefer a check.
Verizon Wireless offers a feature where you can replace your debit card by entering your information online, thus deactivating the card and issuing the old-fashioned paper check to the address on your account. This is a better option but introduces an extra step that many people will simply ignore.
Checks find their way directly into bank accounts while debit cards only make appearances in stores for purchases. If your spending is tight, this might not make a difference. If you use the debit card to purchase something you would have had to purchase anyway, without the debit card, the form of payment won’t affect the amount you spend. Most people’s spending is not tight and controlled. When you send debit cards out to 80,000 teachers, I would believe that many will be used for extra spending and some will not be cashed or used at all. The same is true for wireless phone customers who receive those rebates.
There are reports that the debit cards issued for consumer rebates are unreliable. Some have no problems while others find that cards are declined when they should not be. Even worse, some of these prepaid debit cards have monthly fees. The new rebate debit cards offered by Staples charge a $3 monthly “account maintenance fee” after six months. In states where they are allowed, which I believe is every state except California, fees can eat away at your rebate card balance until you are left with nothing. It is best to cash these rebates or convert them into a check and deposit the funds as soon as possible.
Have you seen more rebates offered in the form of prepaid debit cards? What are your experiences?
When the Credit CARD act passed earlier this year, we weren’t expecting to see many changes until February 2010, unless taken voluntarily by individual companies.
Thankfully (for me, anyway, since I have a personal vendetta against many aspects of credit cards, admittedly due in part to my own foolishness), some of the rules described in the law were designed to go into effect earlier than others. As the Wall Street Journal reports:
Credit card issuers, starting next week, will be required to give consumers 45 days’ notice before raising their interest rate or making other significant changes to a card plan’s terms.
I don’t see this as a punishment, or a blow to capitalism in any way. I think it levels the playing field, assuming life is a competition between a consumer and the huge corporations who do everything they can to maximize profits.
Furthermore:
Issuers also must begin sending bills 21 days before payment is due.
The law doesn’t require issuers to eliminate over-limit fees, but it will prohibit them from imposing these charges unless consumers say they want the ability to exceed their credit line.
Once again, I find that totally fair, and I think it’s a shame that we had to have the legislature step in and finally put a stop to such offensive practices.
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