The Trouble With Credit Cards

Posted by Shane at 7:20 pm

Don’t like reading the fine print? How can we blame you. Most of the time it’s hard to find magnifying glasses strong enough to see it. But don’t be fooled—it’s everywhere, and it sure seems like sometimes it’s there just to take advantage of people with bad eyesight.

The world of financial services–you know, the one we’re trying to make better–is just full of fine print. Here’s a real pre-approved credit card offer Wade got in the mail yesterday:

Now, check out the back side of this offer, in the fine print:

That’s right, this bank (and it’s not uncommon) is saying it can hike the rate on your credit card with them if you become late on payments on a credit card you have with some other bank. Goodness, it’s like these fellas are in a League.

This little credit card “feature”, by the way, is known as universal default. It’s a big issue with Congress these days, and you can see why.

Well, fellow Zopians, we have some good news. We understand that fine print is–well, fine print. And so we’ve tried to keep things simple, and with no gotchas. Perhaps that’s why a lot of borrowers on Zopa are using a simple, friendly Zopa loan to replace their existing credit card debt.

Then again, maybe they’re just trying to save the strain on their eyes from reading all those credit card offers!

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 28th, 2008 at 7:20 pm and is filed under Editorial. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.