What does all of this mean for the average Joe? Two things are certain: Real credit card reform won’t come along until mid-2010, and while you wait, you’d better make your credit card payments on time, every month, or risk going into default.

It probably seems a bit draconian to send a card holder into default if they’re only a few days or even hours late making their payment, but credit card companies have the right to do this – at least for now. And sky-high default interest rates will keep you from making any headway on your card current balance. If you find yourself in default, what can you do?

Take your business to a credit union. They work under a different (some would say more consumer-friendly) set of rules. Here are a few of the differences between a credit union credit card and a regular large financial institution-issued card.

The Availability of Credit

The rules of lending are harsher than ever, thanks to the current recession. Understandably, banks have become more picky about what type of borrower they’ll give credit to. By contrast, many credit unions are willing to issue credit cards to members with low credit scores.

The Interest Rates

Credit cards from federally chartered credit unions mostly have lower base interest rates than cards issued by large financial institutions. They’re also limited to a maximum interest rate usually around 16-18%, even if your account goes into default.

The Reasonable Rules of Default

Unfortunately, some credit card issuers have been known to place credit card holders’ accounts into default status after one missed payment. Even if the lost payment was only one or two hours late. Credit unions seem more willing to work with their members. Many credit unions will overlook a few late payments before taking any action. Always check with your bank or credit union to learn their policy on default.

In today’s economy, we need all the help we can get. It doesn’t help card holders to be slapped with 29% interest when they’re having trouble making a payment in the first place. If your bank has raised your rates one too many times, take your business to a more forgiving credit union.

However if you still want a credit card from a major financial institution, I would recommend Discover credit cards. A good amount of the rules at Discover bank are a lot like credit unions.

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on the internet credit card account Applications

In order to apply for a credit card account, the lending institution requires several pieces of identifying information from you in order to determine your eligibility for a charge card account. When you apply on the computer from reputable websites, the information is encrypted and sent over a secure server. Check to make sure the URL contains “https” instead of the standard “http” as that indicates the take advantage of of a secure server.

Using an on the computer application is actually considered more secure for your financial information than sending it through the mail. When you place your card application in the mailbox, it’s exposed to a number of people before it reaches the charge card account company. There are many opportunities for people to steal the envelope – and your identity.

on the internet Account Access and Security Features

Most charge card accounts are now offering on the internet access to your charge card account account, statement, and payment history. This allows you to see purchases as they happen – and you can easily keep an eye on the account to make sure there are no unauthorized purchases occurring. In some cases, you can request that you get emailed or sent a phone text message whenever a purchase meets certain criteria (is over a certain dollar amount, for example), which gives you another layer of protection against unauthorized charges and identity theft.

Using Your credit card account over the internet

Whenever using your charge card account to shop over the internet, you want to make sure you’re shopping from a reputable website. Once you’ve verified that the URL shows “https” to indicate it’s protected with SSL (secure soekets layer) you might also check for reports on the Better Business Bureau and/or RipOffReports.com to ensure that other consumers haven’t had any problems with the retailer before making your purchase.

Be Aware of Phishing

Phishing is a term that describes the most common way for consumers to become victims of identity theft. In most cases, victims actually give up their personal data becautalize they feel they’re doing so on a secure site or through a secure email with their financial company – but it turns out that scammers send emails that appear to be coming from legitimate companies asking for personal information to confirm your account details.

Never enter personal information based on an email you receive, or to win a prize. A charge card account company or lending institution will never ask you to send personal information via email. If you are linked to a website from an email, don’t enter your information. Call your lending institutioning institution becautalize chances are, that email is a ‘fake link’ that brings you to a ‘fake website’ that looks exactly like your actual lending institution site! If you enter your information here, it goes right into the hands of fraudsters who will steal your identity.

Using your charge card accounts over the internet is safe as long as you take precautions to prevent fraud – just like you take precautions to keep your card safe when you go out shopping in person.

If you would like to apply for a chargecard go to JemCreditCards.com, they have all the applications you will need. I personally advise Discover Credit Card Accounts.

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Your Fico Credit Score can determine if you qualify for a mortgage, if you can get a car loan or credit card. Your credit score will also determine what interest rate and or fees you pay if you qualify for financing. Therefore it is imperative that you manage your credit score just like you manage your money. In fact to manage your credit score is managing your money. A lower fico  credit score can costs you tens of thousands of dollars in a home loan and even more on a credit card. That is why at least once a year you should review your credit reports to ensure nothing is being inaccurately reported. If you find negative and inaccurate information the process of removing it is called credit repair.

Legal Credit Repair.

The process of improving your credit score by disputing and removing inaccurate information from your credit bureau report is your legal right. There are many laws that protect you and requires the credit reporting agencies to make a free copy of your credit report once a year. The Fair Credit Reporting Act is one such law. This law not only makes it easier for consumers to review and improve their credit reports. The Fair Credit Reporting Act mandates the credit reporting agencies to report accurate information and how the information is to be reported. There are actually many other state and federal laws to regulate the credit bureaus and the credit repositories. These laws not only protect the consumers from creditors, they protect consumers from unscrupolous credit repair companies and they also protect  and maintain the integrity of the American Banking System.

Getting Started with Legal Credit Repair.

By going to http://annualcreditreport.com not only do you get a free copy of your report from each of the three national repositories you get instructions to dispute those items you consider inaccurate. The first step is to regularly review your report. Next you should dispute any inaccurate information. It takes 30 to 45 days to get a response from the credit bureaus after they investigate your dispute. If you are not satisfied with the results you should consider hiring a professional credit restoration company.  They need a copy of your credit report and the free copy you get from annual credit report.com will work.

The Credit Repair Company.

The credit restoration company will then review your report with you and begin a series of disputes on your behalf. A good professional company will not only work with the credit repositories to dispute the negative items on your report, they will educate you to properly manage and improve your Fico Credit Scores. With their experience and knowledge of all of your legal rights and options a good company can be very successful in helping you improve and repair your credit.

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What the press coverage reflected was both bad economics and a lack of understanding about how the charge card account market evolved in the U.S. That’s troubling because when the real impact of this legislation—which will reduce credit for many lower-income and riskier borrowers—becomes apparent, I suspect that Washington will respond with more market meddling that will have many of us subsidizing credit for those who can no longer get it.

There are many reasons why America went from a nation of savers to current debtors, why our personal savings rate dipped from a post-World War II average of about 10 percent in the late 1940s to under one percent annually from 2005 to 2007. But one reason certainly was a policy which emerged in the Great Depression and took hold in the post-war era that expanding access to consumer credit would energize our economy and spread the American dream to more households.

Although installment credit had gained a certain amount of respectability in the U.S. beginning in the late 19th century, starting in the 1930s the government came to see consumer credit as a tool it could use to manage and grow the economy. In that era, “the federal government regarded installment credit as a viable way of expanding mass purchasing power as well as–at times–a regulatory tool in Keynesian efforts of macroeconomic management,” wrote the economic historian Jan Logemann in a 2008 article in the Journal of Social History on credit in America.

The National Housing Act provided loans for home modernization, while the Electric Home and Farm Authority, a New Deal agency, “promoted the purchase of electric household durables on installment credit.” Then in the post-war era, the Federal Housing Administration and the Veterans Administration, building on legislative changes to the home mortgage market instituted during the 1930s, sparked a housing boom with low-cost mortgages, and as mass home ownership grew in the 1950s, so did installment credit as a way that Americans could fill up those homes quickly with appliances and furniture.

True, terms were quite different back then. Although Diners Club started offering a charge card to well-heeled Americans in 1949, by the late 1950s, when financial institutions started pitching cards to middle-income households, the average credit limit was still only $300, or a mere $2,200 in today’s dollars. A preferred customer could get as much as $500 in credit—only $3,600 today.
credit card account current debt exploded followed the loosening of underwriting standards in the mortgage industry, and that was no coincidence. Starting in the mid-1970s, advocacy groups and some politicians began complaining that banks were refusing to make mortgages in some lower income neighborhoods, sparking a 20-year effort to loosen underwriting criteria and expand lending, which resulted in a more benign view of outstanding debt in general.

In that era banks found that they could satisfy complaints about lending practices registered against them under the Community Reinvestment Act by promising to issue more charge card accounts in low-income areas. Under pressure, banks also started allowing low income borrowers applying for a mortgage who did not have money for a down payment to borrow the cash via advances on their charge card account—even though historically such lending led to greater mortgage defaults. Pushed by regulators like the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, mortgage lenders also raised their outstanding debt ratio, that is, the ratio of income to total outstanding debt for low-income mortgage borrowers, in the process allowing a mortgage applicant to carry more credit card account current debt and still get a mortgage. From an industry average of about 33 percent, the current debt to income ratio soared to as high as 50 percent in some special lending programs.

Over time lenders naturally applied these standards, relentlessly championed as ‘safe’ by government regulators and advocacy groups, to most borrowers, not just those in low income neighborhoods, thus sanctioning the rise in outstanding debt in America. As mortgage lending grew, so too did charge card account current debt. Inflation-adjusted total U.S. consumer current debt rose nearly three-fold to $2.56 trillion from 1980 through 2008. Of course, the credit card account companies extracted a price for this additional current debt–since much of it was going to Americans with risky credit ratings—in the form of higher interest charges and penalties. By 2008, according to a survey of the National Foundation for Credit Counseling, 26 percent of Americans said they couldn’t pay all of their bills on time, and one in six households was making only the minimum payments on their credit card account current debt.

The meltdown in the home mortgage market has temporarily reversed these trends. As lenders have reinstated historically safer lending patterns, applicants with high levels of credit card account current debt are finding it harder to get mortgages, and more Americans are paying down their consumer current debt, surveys show. Short on capital, charge card account issuers have also been culling risky borrowers from their ranks, trying to head off future problems. Now, the new legislation, passed in reaction to consumer complaints, will make it even more difficult for card companies to profit off risky borrowers by limiting rate increases on existing customers and penalty fees for certain types of late payments.
If you happen to believe that America has gotten drunk on consumer current debt, then no doubt all of these developments will please you. But I get the feeling politicians have little idea whose credit will take the biggest hit from this legislation, and I wonder what they will do when they find out.

The big losers won’t be consumers with good credit, but those with marginal credit ratings, who will find their credit lines yanked or sharply reduced. When that happens, some of these folks will undoubtedly turn to less respectable forms of lending. Expect business at payday lenders and pawn shops to increase, for instance. Soon after, expect stories in the press about the burden that borrowers who can’t get charge card accounts now face in our society. And soon after that expect to hear new proposals from Washington about The Best Way To open up access to credit to more Americans.

That’s when the real burden on credit-worthy customers–who have been called on in the past to subsidize lending to riskier borrowers—will become apparent, I fear.
Get your credit card at JemCreditCards.com. I Recommend Discover Credit Cards

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In 1958, Bank of America started the first all-purpose credit card by simply ‘dropping’ 60,000 of them on Fresno California, (by mailing them out to people who had not asked for them).

The idea was to throw in a new kind of revolving credit line, that when using it anyone could buy whatever they wanted and pay the for it over time. Bank of America hoped to cash in on the post-war consumer frenzy, the race to suburbs, and the desire for new appliances, furniture, and everything else.

The Diner’s Card already existed at the time Bank of America created their first credit cards, but that card was mainly used for food and gas by businessmen, salesmen, and upscale professional persons.

The new, all-purpose card envisioned by Bank of America was thought to be great in theory, but it didn’t really blow up at first. During the 50s and 60s, buying on time had a bit of a bad reputation, so many people weren’t immediately lining up for the all-purpose charge cards.The Depression was fresh in the memories of the older generation, and credit was not something to be used loosely if at all.

Then, in 1966, just as the new credit cards were beginning blow up a bit, an event that has come to be referred to as “The Chicago Debacle” almost buried the entire industry before it got out of training pants. That year, just before the holidays, a group of local banks dropped FIVE MILLION cards on the Chicagoland area, hoping to cash in on holiday charges.

The Chicago drop was so indiscriminate and sloppy that babies, dogs, and dead people got credit card accounts in the mail, and so many were stolen from mailboxes and sold on the black market (the intended recipients got huge bills in January when they didn’t even know they’d been mailed a card) that a Congressional uproar started. Many representatives in Congress called for the credit cards to be outlawed.

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Instead, the twin overseers VISA and Mastercard came into being to get things under control and create some type of order. They dragged retailers into a national network (thus making the cards easier for consumers to use almost anywhere) and they proceeded to fight fraud and create some basic underwriting standards.

The industry began to stabilize, and the credit cards became much more popular.

However, by 1980 most banks were running into problems with state usury laws (the laws that limit the interest that can be charged on unsecured loans). Double digit inflation was taking all the profit out of credit cards, which were capped at 12 percent apr while banks were themselves paying rates of up to 20 percent on their own borrowing.

So Citibank approached the state of South Dakota and offered to move its whole credit card operation to there if it would repeal the South Dekota sury law. South Dekota needed jobs, Citibank needed to charge more interest. It was a match made in heaven. (Or hell.)

Once that lid was blown off, credit card accounts became extremely profitable. The state of Delaware soon became another mecca for the credit card companies, actively courting them for the jobs. Delaware to this day continues to house a strong industry lobby, a fact that is not altogether wonderful considering their former Senator is now the Vice President.

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