“First of all, they consider “default” to be going over your limit or being late on a payment once or twice. ” – That’s irresponsible. The limit is clearly stated and the due date is clearly stated on your bill. How is this responsible behavior?

“So you have to go around knowing exactly what your balance is at all times, exactly what your finance charges will be, for every card you have. This is impossible.” – I don’t believe this is impossible if you are responsible, if you charge everything without keeping track, that may be all fine and good but it’s not responsible behavior. Responsible means you know what your balance is, you know what your limit is, and you stay under it.

Yes, credit card companies do use a lot of tricks, but the examples you use are of irresponsible behavior.

I love my credit cards, they enable me to carry purchasing power in my wallet without having to carry the cash itself. Am I credit card company supporter? Yes. Do I support all their practices? No. But it’s like the government, I wholeheartedly support the United States of America and yet I disagree with plenty of the laws and practices.

In such cases, I want my payments to go to these first, so as to eliminate as much of that portion of the debt as possible before it matures and the deferred interest becomes part of the balance. It seems that this one rule will cause my payment instead to go to the rest of the balance, and that is not desirable.

So i like the can’t-bill-an-unactivated card idea.. Don’t know yet the effect on my credit overall, but since i use debit cards nearly all the time, i don’t care.

I’m with erik. This really does nothing. It just saves people who already in trouble a few days and a few cents. Doesn’t solve the reason.

saladdin

Shame on them for trying to take advantage of people anyway. It may not do much for people who are already over their heads, but it rectifies a few ‘unfair’ things for the rest of us.

I have a bunch of friends (mid-20′s) who own BMWs and nice houses… that stuff only happens because credit is cheap! But, they make all their payments and, to my knowledge, are at no risk in defaulting, so it’s not like they were irresponsible.

The prevalent school of thought is not to charge anything that you cannot afford to pay when the cycle ends. That being said I’m not exactly sure what an additional few grace period days will do for people. Every so often I’m sure a pay day will fall into that extended period and help a little, but not so much that it will help those who are already far behind on their payments.

As far as spreading the payment in excess of minimums, and I’ve eluded to this on my own blog–refer to Try Taking A Different Approach to Paying Down Debt for a full explanation, there are times when that won’t really be of significant help. Many people got in over their heads at lower rates before any increases so most of their interest charges will be from those charges. The best solution would be to allow consumers to choose which charges their payments in excess of minimums are applied to (highly unlikely, I know)

I guess this act is more likely than not intended to be a forward-looking bill rather than anything to remedy all of the consumer debt that exists today (obviously the start date for the rules changes is a pretty good indication of that!)

I had not heard of double billing before, that’s just criminal. It’s too bad these new regs weren’t passed a few years ago. It seems like many pundits believe consumer credit is the next big shoe to drop, and I agree.

I believe this will help people who are struggling financially to have a bit of a leeaway. After all, the economy isn’t too forgiving.