Consumer Credit Card Warning – Press Release

The major credit card banks and firms including American Express, Discover Card, Visa Card and Mastercard are currently allegedly doing everything they can which in-effect seriously impacts credit card users and of major detriment to the already poor economy and public interest. They are doing things such as sharply lowering credit limits, restricting and closing accounts sometimes arbitrarily, imposing excessive fees and high interest rates. Much of those customer negatives are being done with flimsy, little or no valid reason.

A major impact of those credit-card issues is not only the significant lowering of consumer spending power and access to credit for emergencies but also reductions in FICO credit scores which occur when your credit card balance becomes a higher ratio vs your credit limit. That severely impacts other loans including car loan and home mortgage interest rates which rates can be significantly higher as a highly related side-effect and end-result of how poorly the large credit card issuers are treating many of their credit-card holders.

Still another serious issue is the fact credit-cards routinely permit you to exceed your assigned card credit limit. For example, we have been told by a Wells Fargo bank card employee they allow credit limits to be automatically exceeded by as much as 20%. At first you may think that is actually a nice benefit from your credit card issuer but unfortunately it may sometimes turn-out to be a nightmare.

The reason it’s really a major negative for you is the fact unless you promptly pay the full over-the-limit amount along with your regular payment there are substantial costs involved, i.e. approx $39 over-limit fee, $35 late-charge and you can also expect a huge increase of your card interest rate to say 24.99% or even more with some credit cards.

Remember, all that severe damage to your finances can happen even if you exceed your credit limit by an insignificant amount, perhaps just a few dollars possibly resulting from you not closely monitoring your credit card account balance on a daily or even a real-time basis, as consumers do not do.

Keep in mind as long as you fail to pay the exact over-limit amount and all the high associated costs they continue to be charged each and every month. Very quickly the monthly fees can easily exceed your minimum payment amount by as much as 150% or more from what we have seen, i.e. minimum payment of about $80 but monthly fees and interest charge of roughly $200 per month.

In-effect that means the credit card account will never be paid off and balance will only increase for years into the future unless you come into lots of money one day to pay the credit card off, or you could easily owe hundreds of thousands of dollars on your original low balance credit card over time!