Credit Card Companies Will Sort of Have to Find New Ways to Screw You Starting Tomorrow

New York – The new magic plastic laws finally go into effect tomorrow and the banks will have to abide by new regulations on terms and disclosures.  The idea is to keep banks from digging all of us into debt the old fashioned way – by offering credit to anyone who can be classified as a carbon-based life form with unrealistic credit limits and low minimum payments and reserving the option to raise interest rates without warning, particularly with the rationalization that their executives don’t have enough money in their bonus coffers to purchase an island in the Caribbean for their Christmas parties. 
Here is a look at the old way of doing business and the new way and how it will affect you as a consumer:

INTEREST RATES



BEFORE:  Banks could raise interest rates on any one of your accounts at any time on existing balances.  Notices of such account changes would arrive in booklet form (about the size of your local Yellowbook™) with print the average consumer could not read without charging at least an additional $5,000 on their cards for Lasik surgery.  Also, in some states banks were even allowed to raise interest rates on purchases that they had hired statisticians on the consumer's dime to speculate that you might make in the near future based upon past spending behavior, even if your family members were able to prove you were deceased before predicted purchases were made via a notarized death certificate.

NOW: Rates cannot be raised within the first year that a new account is opened unless it is clearly stated that the rate will end before the calendar year ends.  Also, they can no longer insist that a cardholder’s body be exhumed for DNA testing at your expense to be taken as proof of death. They can only raise rates on existing balances if the account is at least sixty days past due, but consumers bear the brunt of keeping up with days on the Chinese Lunar calendar as the banks will be likely forwarding their payments to Beijing. If consumers pay on time, for six consecutive months, original rates must be restored.  That is, provided the consumer can get through to a live person at the bank before their phone-mail system cuts them off so many times that their brain becomes reduced to gray matter on the drywall, enabling their loved ones to collect on life insurance, making it all a moot point anyway.  There is still no cap on interest rates, thus ensuring future donations to political campaigns.

SERVICE CHARGES

BEFORE: Banks used to be able to charge as much as they wanted, like fees equal to your first year’s credit line.  That was mostly an issue among sub-prime cards marketed to those who may as well have just crawled out of the primordial ooze, but a serious issue nonetheless.  Sort of the same scenario as when they let people with no fixed income or employment records or proof of existence obtain mortgages. 


NOW: Service fees will be capped at the first year for the credit limit at a total of 25%.  After that, they can still take a kidney.

GRACE PERIODS



BEFORE: The days of the credit card companies being able to send a statement out one month six weeks before the due date, and the next month six days before the due date, and the next month six hours before the due date on a revolving schedule throughout the year that most us would never, ever notice because it would take our poor eyes off of the Pennysaver or the Val-Pak are going to go away.

NOW: The new law requires that due dates must now remain consistent so that over stressed, overly tired consumers are not unwittingly racking up fees while their statement sits under a piles upon piles of junk mail on the kitchen table and beneath a carry-out pile of baby back ribs, as they haven’t had the energy to cook since before the card was issued to them in the first place.