Archive for February, 2010

Of course we all know that big banks and credit card companies are a very forgiving lot. NOT.

Miss a payment by a few hours and you’ll find your interest rate doubled, your fees tripled and your house burned to the ground. Well maybe not burned to the ground, but Bank of America has been known to TP the trees of borrowers who couldn’t make their new higher minimum payments. And I have heard rumors of shit-filled bags set on fire and left on doorsteps by clean-cut men seen leaving the scene of the crime in armored cars with the Wells Fargo logo.

So we should be just as forgiving when it turns out that the folks at Citi printed the Social Security numbers of customers on the outside of envelopes it mailed to 600,000 customers in late January.

Citibank says that there is little or no risk because the numbers were not explicitly identified as a Social Security numbers and they were part of a larger string of numbers that resembled a mail routing number. That being said, now that the story has made national headlines, the criminal identify theft community has unanimously agreed not to pull the SSN’s from that string of numbers and use it to ass-rape the credit of Citi customers. They said it would be just too easy and would reflect poorly on the integrity of their industry.

But credit card companies don’t have such high standards.  Instead of lowering their customers rates or something more noble * and costly * Citibank said that it decided to notify the customers and to give them the option of enrolling in six months of no-cost credit monitoring. That’s got to cost Citi tens of thousands of dollars. How will they ever recover?

So the bottom line is that customers need to be perfect or face potentially devastating changes in their card agreements (which Citi has profited from to no end) but the bank can make a major screw-up that can damage their customers for years and escape with little more than a mea culpa. Seems fair. NOT.

The fact of the matter is that I have multiple credit cards, and Citibank has always been the most aggressive in playing the shell game to squeeze very penny they can from me. But this is the last straw. I’ll be cancelling that card and never doing business with these incompetent thieves again.

Good riddance.

*except in the mailroom.

I am a huge fan of Jon Stewart and The Daily Show and the following clip is one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen on the show.

To celebrate the dawn of the CARD Act era, TDS devoted a third of their show to kicking Bank of America and the credit card industry squarely in the teeth. This is truly must-see IP.

You are a Fool.

Well, at least you should be. I’m talking about fool with a capital “F”, which is what fans of the personal finance website The Motley Fool are known as.

The Fool was founded in the early 1990’s by David and Tom Gardner in Northern Virginia and has since grown to become one of the most well-respected multimedia financial-services and investment communities on the web.  The Motley Fool reaches millions of people each month online and has branched out into books, newspaper columns, television appearances, and subscription newsletter services.

Which brings us to the subject of my latest Required Reading.

The Motley Fool Personal Finance Workbook : A Foolproof Guide to Organizing Your Cash and Building Wealth takes the Fools away from their usual conversations on stocks bonds and dives into the blocking and tackling concerns of basic money management. Well known for their humor as well as for their financial savvy, the Gardners try to keep it light when helping you look at money management in a new light. (We know it’s boring, the authors say; “that’s why we’ve hidden crisp five-dollar bills throughout the pages.”)

The dreariest of money matters-budgets, debt, insurance and taxes-are addressed in reassuring prose, illustrated with charts and further detailed with checklists that you can work through and goal graphs than you can adopt.

Even reluctant readers will be coaxed to face financial realities through the Gardners’ encouragement and the helpful budget planning worksheets. You won’t find dazzling new insights on how to hire a financial planner or buy big-ticket items, but they will find very friendly advisors who crack jokes as they dispense wisdom. The substance here is well-tread ground, as it should be, but the style is straight from the Fool’s funny bone.

Check out this book and also visit the Fool’s website and become a free member. Getting out of debt is just phase one. When you’re ready to build wealth, you’ll wan to do it Foolishly.