Tuesday, October 23, 2007

Robin Hood

I watched the movie "Maxed Out" last night. It's about how people get saddled with debt and have to declare bankruptcy. There were a lot of crying people in the movie saying that they didn't realize that they were getting into trouble. That they trusted the credit card companies to only lend them money if the credit card companies thought they could pay them back. I know I know, what idiots! They balanced out those losers with some people who seemed to have legitimate claims against the credit card companies.

In any case, the real good part was when this professor from Harvard said something like "Credit is sooo lucrative" then she repeated "You don't understand just how lucrative it is, it's excessively profitable"

That made me think, it's our job as financially responsible people to take as much money from the credit card companies as possible: every free offer, every 0% interest deal, every free mile. We should extract every last penny of cash back. We must make the credit card companiespay for exploiting others.

We have the gift of being able to pay our debts on time and to be able to add. Let's put that to good use

4 comments:

Tim said...

i heard a counter argument to the "let's take them for all they're worth" concept once: the reason credit card companies can offer 0% balance transfers, cash back, rewards, etc. is because the unwashed masses are paying 23.99% APR. therefore, it's your drowning-in-debt next door neighbor, who's financing this. therefore, you're taking money from you neighbor.

of course, the 0% transfers are just another way to suck more people in, so i don't exactly feel bad about taking money from the credit card companies. plus, we take money -> they have to make more money -> they ratchet up the interest rates -> people get fed up, and get rid of their credit cards... kind of like what Reagan did with the arms race...

Greg said...

Dam, I was feeling all righteous.

Anonymous said...

"The unwashed masses are paying 23.99% APR." The masses pay this amount because the state government which allows this business to run in their state gives them the right to charge that amount. States like MA and RI don't allow this high of a rate thus no credit company resides in those states. The result of MA and RI's high moral ground is a loss of tax revenue and job growth.

"We must make the credit card companies pay for exploiting others" You know who said that before... (replace companies with those who lend money) The medieval Christian church. The result was nearly eliminating the Knights Templar and killing Jews.


Credit card companies don't want to be owners of any defaulted items. Defaulted things have carrying costs. What the masses fear are credit card companies owning property because to reduce the carrying costs they will fire sale the properties. The outcome is devaluing houses. So please abuse credit card companies becasue as you take from your neighbor, his house gets taken from him, sold on the cheap (lowers your house value) and Al Bundy becomes your nieghbor.

Unknown said...

Of course there are consumer advocates that can help reduce credit card rates...

go to moneymanagement.org

-jeff