The LA Times’ David Lazarus has a great article today about the new increases in interest rates for Citibank credit card holders; not to sound self-centered, but this is the kind of boring-sounding stuff I would skin (sorry!), except that it happens to apply to me as well. A week or two ago, I got a letter from Citibank about my credit card’s interest rates being raised to about 29% (from 7.9%). I’ve never been late on a payment, never missed a bill; I always make sure I have enough money to pay off my credit card every month. But with the window between the delivery of statements and the day payment is due closing (an upcoming law mandates a 21-day grace period), the new rate increase could be catastrophic.
Credit cards are scary and dangerous things (Lazarus compares the credit card companies to “Tony Soprano and his crew”). The summer before my senior year of college, I got a job working at the mall. The Providence Place mall is one of my favorite malls in the world, by the way — think what you want about malls, but this one had:
- Forever 21
- Orange Julius/Dairy Queen
- A Johnny Rockets right near the movie theater (the attendants of this movie theater were not diligent — you could sneak in a burger, easy)
- The Cheesecake Factory, the sliders from which were my main food source for three years
- An extremely good Nordstrom’s (it was always Clinique bonus time)
- etc.
Anyway, without realizing it, I racked up a pretty sizable credit card bill. The kind of credit card bill that might make you cry when you open the envelope. The kind where you look at certain charges and think someone must have stolen your card, but it was just you, making purchases in a kind of twilight state. The idea of giving myself license to do this now is laughable, but I was 20 years old and pretty dumb, and also had misappropriated a lot of my income as “expendable” when it was more like “for the phone bill.” I had to ask my folks for some scrillz to pay it off, and then put my credit card in a drawer for the remainder of the summer. The feeling stuck with me for a while (embarrassment, shame, wondering about how much people might pay for some of my donated ova), so I haven’t made the same mistake again. But once you know how it feels to roam around a decent mall spending money you don’t have, once you let yourself get there, you know that unless you’re careful, it can happen again. I’m sure some people are immune, but those people are probably robots.
Buying things on credit is already a risky move, but it’s also increasingly hard to avoid. It’s terribly sad to me that credit card companies are taking advantage of people’s mistakes to this degree.
/rant
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