Credit Card Debt Management

You bank online, you play games online, you check the weather, the news and sports scores online, some people even work and date online. It makes sense to shop for credit card offers online as well. Just make sure you are using a reputable web site that offers details on the credit card offers along with a side-by-side offer comparison. Banks.com has compiled pretty comprehensive lists of credit card offers under categories like “Business credit cards” and “bad credit credit cards.” Simple to use, easy to read.

If you are eyeing new credit card offers - particularly for the purposes of balance transfers - you will want to read the latest from The Motley Fool. Essentially, a strategy used in 99 percent of credit card offers is to apply monthly payments in a tiered system to pay off lowest-interest debt first. For instance that $140 payment will go first toward interest charges and then toward paying off balance transfer amounts. This holds true even if the card has been used for purchases or cash advances, transactions that carry much larger interest rates. It is a tiered system of repayment. Almost as dirty as the Universal Default Policy so many credit card companies love. The Motley Fool scoured 300 credit card offers and found the four - that’s right, four - that don’t use this system.

Last but not least, the Baltimore Sun is taking notice of the lenders’ new habit of replacing mortgage offers with new and improved, more lenient credit card offers. A recent post in My Two Dollars points out that lenders “have eased their lending standards to be able to grab a bigger share of the credit card market, which the article says is ‘banker-ese for making lots of loans that won’t get paid back.’”

And the lenders will write-off the no-pay customers and in turn be forced to raise interest rates for good-credit customers and find more ways to slip in these mystical, magical fees. I guess they just feel like playing Robin Hood.