Credit card users paid $130 billion in fees, interest in 2022, federal watchdog says
Credit card users paid $130 billion in fees, interest in 2022, federal watchdog says
Americans paid $130 billion in credit card interest and fees in 2022, according to a new report. Here are three strategies to help limit those charges.
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These fees are how they're paying for your airline miles and cash back bonuses.
Personally, I'm perfectly fine without a credit card. I don't care if I'm "giving up free money" because I know this is where it's coming from.
Jokes on them.
I have specifically have CC's without a yearly fee, and get cash back.
I calculated a long time ago, the amount of spending I would need to do through a credit card per month, to just break even on the yearly fee.
Not fucking worth it.
Now you read the fine print, and all these CC companies reduced the time before interest kicks in to like 20 days instead of a month.
Don't fall for that shit. Read the details. Most CC's are a scam.
Do you have an example of a card who's interest is applied before month end? That sounds shitty as hell
https://www.capitalone.com/learn-grow/money-management/credit-card-grace-period/
A lot of them are now at a 21-day grace period.
After giving this a read, I don't think anyone has anything to get upset over. Unless I'm misreading this, it's just calling the time between your statement being sent to you and when payment is due the "grace period." Definitely not what I initially thought.
That’s interest charged from the time you get your statement. Not from the date of purchase. Which means no interest for upwards of 51 days if there's a 21 day grace period.
This isn’t the big deal you’re making it out to be.
I've never seen bank fees for using a credit card in the USA.
Closest I've seen is certain methods of payment prefer a check since there's no Stripe X% processing fee.
I managed to pay off a credit card that had points associated with it, so I set up my bills to auto-pay, and to automatically pay the whole balance early every month.
This is about the only good way to use credit cards. It feels good knowing I'm costing them money.
I'd be very surprised if you were actually costing them any money. The value of your points is almost certainly less than the merchant fees they're collecting from your payees.
Those points are all paid for by the fees they charge the people you pay. You aren’t costing them money, you’re just not making them as much as people who can’t/don’t pay off their credit cards.
So you're just fine with using your checking account which has no real fraud protection? The bank doesn't care, it isn't their money on the line. Credit card companies are putting up their money and in the case of fraud, they want their money back, protecting you. Nevermind the other benefits, which you've stated you don't care about.
Mastercard and Visa both offer the same zero liability protection on debit cards as credit cards. So both my cards are comparable to credit cards in that regard. If I was at a bank that didn't have good fraud protection I'd be shopping around.
I've never had a situation where fraud took money out of my account. Someone got my debit card information somehow (I'm surprised it doesn't happen more often). The bank called me, asked if that was me that was in London trying to buy something out of a vending machine, I said nope, they turned off the card and sent me a new one. No money ever left my account, and I wasn't terribly inconvenienced, other than having to change a few autopay thingies.
I do get cash back bonus on my PayPal debit card. I appreciate the irony of taking advantage of that in contrast with my original comment. But I presume since PayPal is not a credit card company, they're paying for it with the merchant fees they collect. I could be wrong.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
All that said to say there's nothing a credit card can offer me that a debit card can't, except debt.
It's always been a kickback towards the consumer so the CC companies can screw businesses.
Credit card companies are a huge leech on our economy.