Ried Rants

Way back when, maybe the 1800’s banks never charged interest. You know why? Because no one owns time. It was wrong for them to charge folks on time so they never charged interest. Now things are different banks make tons of money off any of us who have an account. Be it a deposit account, loan or credit card.

Fees are outrageous and are getting worse for some folks. I heard of credit unions that are charging their customers a fee to use their own debit card. How crazy is that? Right now a lot of folks are living hand to mouth and as a result they have started leveraging their credit card accounts.

The new thing is, or maybe not so new, to reduce the credit limit on a cardholders account. And it matters not if the person has good credit or pays on time or even over pays each month. If the credit analyst determines that the cardholder is a “bad risk” for whatever reason they will reduce the cardholders account to what the balance is. Another case was a bank that sent a letter to the cardholder. You know those letters that you never read and the letter stated that if the cardholder charged one more item on their card that the interest rate on the card would rise to 24% from 7.9%. Can you believe that garbage?

I suppose this is a result of so many folks dumping their unsecured debt by filing bankruptcy. This is another fine example of the few and small percentage making bad for everyone else.

I mean really we get nickel and dimed to death. And God forbid you get overdrawn at your bank; that starts a cascade of events that can cost $50-$75 per NSF transaction. Does it really cost the bank $25 - $35 when an account is overdrawn? Very doubtful. Then if the bank does not pay the vendor well that makes it even worse because you get stuck with another $25-$35 to pay the vendor where you purchased the item.

It is unfortunate that in our society we are taught to be over extended and to have the same outlandish debt to income ratio for our entire lives.

So many of us want more money to live more comfortably and if you take just a second to look at how the rich people live you will often find that they have so much “stuff” that they have no real wealth either. Yes, they live in nicer houses and drive nicer cars. But just think if the fame that they have was suddenly taken away for whatever reason. They would be in a really bad spot too because many of them have not saved any money for a rainy day.