Creditors Favorite Weapon…The Fine Print

In today’s business section of The Miami Herald there was a very informative article straightforwardly entitled “Read fine print on credit card statements”. This article provides advice and shows just how important taking the time to read all that stuff is. I know that most people don’t read it all. They assume that since its a major company issuing the card, then they can be trusted. I say, not so fast my friend.

Credit card companies love putting stuff in the fine print that will make it extremely hard for you to exert your own rights against them. These companies have plenty of lawyers working for them and know how to word things so that they can basically do whatever they want.

Now they can’t totally do whatever they want, and that’s when reading the fine print can come in very handy. They put in certain steps that you need to follow in order to counter the actions that they take.

Less straight forward is the approach taken by Bank of America. In one of those fine-print notices, it informs customers who may have a relatively low rate on their cards that their interest rate will be climbing — up to several percentage points in some cases — unless they reject the increase.

Again, customers need to read that fine print. They must follow specific instructions for rejecting the rate increase — and they have a relatively short window to do so.

”If your account is used at any time after [the effective date of the increase] this change will apply to your account even if you sent us timely notice rejecting the change,” Bank of America says.

That means if you failed to cancel an automatic debit on the card, for example, the rate increase will be triggered.

Now this is a far from straight forward approach on Bank of America’s part, but by being aware of the fine print you can combat it. As with anything in this world, your key is information. By taking the responsibility of completely researching and knowing just what your getting into to, you can feel safe and secure.

I know it’s awfully hard to read all that fine print, its hard for me too. It is well worth it so for the potential headaches you can avoid. This is especially difficult for people with not so great credit. Those cards for people with poor credit you’ll find have a whole lot more fine print than the average card. This is just something your gonna have to expect. Think of it as a penalty for letting your credit situation get that way.

I know a lot of you might be saying to yourselves, why read the small print because I’m not going to understand it anyway. I’d say to you that if its a card that has such complicated small print that you are unable to understand it, then its probably not a card you should be interested in getting. There are ones out there that can be pretty straightforward, I’d look for one of those.

Right now is especially a time when you have to pay very close attention to all that fine print. With credit card reform on the horizon, a lot of the credit card companies are trying to slip stuff in under the deadline that’s going to be illegal for them to do once the new laws go into effect.

Unless its entirely necessary I’d even advocate staying away from opening ANY new accounts until after the laws go into effect. I know this might be hard, especially if your undertaking a major purchase and see some of those great teaser rates you could take advantage of right away. Be careful on those. I’m sure you’ll notice that those rates are put in very big print, that’s because they know its good and are trying to entice you. The better it looks the bigger the print is going to be, you don’t need to pay very close attention to catch that part. All the reality is down at the bottom in small letters, that’s where your attention needs to be.

In the grand scheme of things taking the time to read the fine print will probably mean an extra 10 minutes or so of your time. Taking that small part of your time in the short term, will save you 10X that in time, effort and headaches in the wrong run. I think that’s a very worthwhile exchange.