Just more of the same liberal victim mentality crap.
If you don't want to pay excessive interest rates/late fees, then don't borrow the money.
That simple.
They shouldn't be allowed to troll college campuses to hand out credit cards to students who are unable to pay back the loans. My friend ended up paying about $500.00 for stuff that originally cost about $150.00 to begin with. But her daughter didn't understand the importance of paying exactly on time and incurred outrageously high penalties and quickly increased interest rates. So that by the time her mother found out about it was over $500.00 to buy the whole thing off.
Isn’t that loan sharking? I thought that loan sharking was against the law.
Loan sharking:
When a borrower is charged interest above an established legal rate. Depending on where you live, lenders typically cannot charge more than 60% interest per annum.
http://www.investopedia.com/terms/l/loansharking.asp
50% markup is plenty.
A lot of people are living in credit cards, home equity loans etc. to make ends meet. It'll be interesting to see what happens with the new law. My guess is that they'll be a flood of Chapter 11 filings followed up by a tightening of credit. Banks will end up taking the hit.
In a 30-year history, I've never had a late payment or missed payment or bankruptcy. But let me tell you what happened, with a credit card company.
Many of them have a way of letting your payment sit around in the joint before "processing" it. Your due date could be the 15th, you mail on the 8th or 9th, they say it didnt' get "posted" till the 17th. Voila, late fee!
I actually overnighted payments so I could prove they were getting there on time. Did they recieve them the day I said they got there? Yes. Ah, but they were "posted" later. More late fees.
With every late fee, my interest rate was upped. After all, they have the right to do that...if you're late.
After nine months of this horsecrap, and with the interest rate at 26%, I just paid the damned thing off in full. (And yeah, they squeezed an extra payment out of me, because my certified check, which was overnighted...you got it...didn't get there in time). Paid it off, goodbye, close this account.
The phone starts to ring. You're such a good customer, we'd like to lower your rate--to 9%!
Some of them (most of them?) are truly predatory. Talk to people who've worked inside these places. The attidude is adversarial: How can we GET these people to pay more? And the managers are incentivized to extract every cent possible. Ethics get lost in this.
As for your "then don't borrow the money"...well, if it weren't for credit, America would be as prosperous as the Ukraine. I exaggerate, but this country runs on credit, shor-term, long-term, whatever.
You must have a very pleasant life. All you need is one catastrophic illness that costs you a few hundred thousand dollars more than your insurance carrier is prepared to cover, or the loss of a job, or a divorce. I got into credit card trouble when my husband walked out, leaving me with two young children at a time when I was too sick to work and could not legally sell our house. I had to charge food, gas, and utilities. I later worked like a demon but still would never have gotten the debts paid off if I hadn't gotten a chunk of money. Now I'm down to one card that still has to be paid off and I'm making progress, but Citibank isn't making it easy. I'm not sure I'll ever be able to pay off a problem that was incurred years ago.
You haven't read a credit / finance agreement lately, have you? If you enter into one, you'd better make sure you have adequate legal representation, or that overdue library book might just cost you a few thousand dollars.
B.S. They hook college students on easy credit, then 2 late payments in 18 months and they are suddenly paying 28% interest. Greenspan rasies rates, credit card cos raise theirs. Greenspan lowers rates, credit card cos leave theirs alone. They practically invite bankruptcy the way they double and triple the final tallies of people who fall into lousy luck. Don't buy this crap about mere irresponsibility. Do some people spend more than they should and take on mortgages they can't handle? Sure. But 88% of all bankruptcies are due to ether illness, death of primary breadwinner or spouse, or loss of primary income where the filer is over 50 years old. It is not easy to get another job for a lot of these guys in their 50's, espcially if they don't have a racial or gender card to play.
This bill is a direct result of millions in lobbying funds from MBNA et al to the GOP (and sme Dems too). It is shameful to have such a one-sided bill, bought and paid for. Meanwhile us evangelical and values-centric voters who put the GOP in power...what do we get? Nuclear option? No, appeasement of Schumer et al. Defense of our borders? No, amnesty. Toss out the U.N.? No, signing the Sea Treaty. Sticking it to environmental wackos? No, Federal partnerships with the Nature Conservancy to steal land from the public. MBNA didn't put Bush in power. It was Americans who vote their values, and a single 527 group which did it. It would be nice if they started to recognize that support with action.
And if you don't want deadbeat customers, be a little careful who you lend money to.
Which reminds me: If more people are forced by new bankruptcy law to repay credit card companies, that means credit card companies can lower their rates, right?
I mean, that would bring down the cost of lending money.
So they'll lower their rates, right? Won't they? Or am I missing something?