Working a regular 7-5 job, I just don’t have time to meet either bankers or gov’t hours. Being a laborer, I’m not supposed to have access to luxuries like telephonic communications during the day. Usually, I wish I didn’t even have to take holidays off since they are useless days. I plan out trivial things like vehicle registration weeks in advance. A lunch hour will at least let you handle anything within three blocks as the traffic allows. Maybe I’ll take the first part of the day off I took for my sister’s wedding to go handle something like visiting the DMV, or the mechanic. While it’s trivial to transfer balances online to handle a CC, if my internet goes out, it’s probably going to go out for a few weeks no matter how much it bothers me. I don’t even want to think about the amount of planning that would have to go into solving the cascade of problems that would surely result from a problem that never needed to exist in the first place.

My bank once signed me up for one of those things automatically. It was interesting for a bit, but once I realized the danger inherent in it, I canceled it immediately despite the impact on my credit score. Maybe that will affect me negatively someday, but I made it through college without borrowing money, so hopefully I won’t have a need to in the future.

“Credit card perks” is an oxymoron, Just like airline miles offers, most go unused and are only offered as an enticement.

While the readers of this blog seem to be an exception, the vast majority of Americans abuse credit when given access to it. Banks know this but want their piece of the action no matter what the toll is on the lives of the average consumer, e.g., stress, divorce, and suicide.

Ultimately though, the blame falls on anyone who believes there are perks associated with credit card use.

I’d like to see the numbers on how much extra the average person spends because they are using credit cards (as opposed to cash) over time, in comparision to how much benefit they receive from using credit cards.

If you pay everything off every month, why care about a FICO score at all? If you are living within your means, you don’t need one.

http://www.bankrate.com/nydn/news/cc/20080328_close_credit_card_FICO_score_a1.asp

“I’m going to start by providing a couple of misconceptions that I hear regularly with regard to closing accounts. No. 1, that the FICO score penalizes you for having too much available credit, and No. 2, that if you close an account, you lose all the history associated with that account.

It’s just not true that you can have too much available credit. That by itself is never a negative with the score. Sometimes the things you do to get too much can be a problem, such as opening a bunch of new accounts, but for the most part, that’s just kind of an old wives’ tale.”