patrick.net

Call it Crazy says

dublin hillz says

errc says

zzyzzx says

errc says

Why do you assume they are morons?

Because they are voluntarily paying extra on every purchase they make with their cards.

Not if they are taking the borrowed money, and investing it at greater returns.

Lol, credit cards annual interest rates on average are double the stock market performance. That strategy is a sure path to eventual bankruptcy.

Even worse than double..

All those paying off their balances each month and enjoying the rewards must remember the rewards are really being paid by those paying high interest rates on their balances. No wonder banks have to charge such high interest rates.

curious2 says

I feel your pain, but from the opposite direction: I'm sick of

There is a lot of racism among Republicans. I have lived in more racist states than I do now and it is nauseating how much it permeates thinking among all socioeconomic classes. It sounds like you have other reasons to be against aca, as do I, so I respect that.

curious2 says

schizophrenic lemon socialism, because that maximizes power (including revenue) for the authors of the legislation

...sadly...

errc says

Please explain to me how you have the nerve to refer to what some confuse as "private" "health" "insurance", as risk management.

I assume you are being sarcastic? It's all about risk management. The insurance company takes on risk by covering you, and you take on risk by purchasing their insurance. If you choose low-cost, high-deductible coverage, you are taking on a greater risk. High-deductible insurance is not new. It's a choice you have.

Strategist says

All those paying off their balances each month and enjoying the rewards must remember the rewards are really being paid by those paying high interest rates on their balances. No wonder banks have to charge such high interest rates.

Hahahahaha, those who pay off their balances each month are takers. That's a new one. You don't think every penny of those retarded interest rates is going into the executives' pockets?

Heraclitusstudent says

Call it Crazy says

Something similar, if we have to make a large purchase, we'll cycle it through zero percent offers and use "other people's money" for the year while gaining the card points and bonus points...

The points are nice, it's been a while since I've actually had to pay for an airline ticket...

This is exactly the kind of mentality that allowed the housing bubble, and allows credit card companies to skim billions from the economy.

Hahahahaha, another funny statement. How is shuffling a balance (much less one's annual income) at 0% APR even close to comparable to taking out an adjustable rate loan (10 times one's annual income) at 3-5% APR?

Call it Crazy says

sbh says

They charge this much because they are so over regulated. They charge this much because they are under-regulated. She's my daughter. She's my sister.

Huh??? What???? Looks like you started drinking early today....

The conservatives never get the references to classics.

http://www.youtube.com/embed/HuAZGFYW6DE

JH says

Strategist says

All those paying off their balances each month and enjoying the rewards must remember the rewards are really being paid by those paying high interest rates on their balances. No wonder banks have to charge such high interest rates.

Hahahahaha, those who pay off their balances each month are takers. That's a new one. You don't think every penny of those retarded interest rates is going into the executives' pockets?

Not at all.
I have a $300 American Express rebate, and roughly $400 in a MasterCard.
I have never paid annual fees, and I always pay off my balances in full.
I'm constantly being hounded by the credit card companies to borrow.
How does the credit card bank make money from me? They must really hate people like me.

Strategist says

Not at all.

I have a $300 American Express rebate, and roughly $400 in a MasterCard.

I have never paid annual fees, and I always pay off my balances in full.

I'm constantly being hounded by the credit card companies to borrow.

How does the credit card bank make money from me? They must really hate people like me.

They get money from merchants that you buy goods/service from. The credit cards charge merchants a credit processing fee. The fee is usually between 1% to 5% of your charge amount. So the creditcard company is not losing money when giving you a rebate.

Quigley says

Here's a true scenario:

Joe has $5,000. He puts it in Bank.

Bank offers Joe a Bank credit card with a $5,000 credit limit.

Joe uses the Bank credit card, and gets charged 21% interest to use the money he put into Bank.

What Joe does from here determines if he is an idiot or not.

If Joe pays off the credit card bill before the end of the grace period during each billing, he is all right.

Reality says

The fee is usually between 1% to 5% of your charge amount. So the creditcard company is not losing money when giving you a rebate.

Base salaries and other overhead.

Call it Crazy says

The average credit card interest rate for people with fair credit has hit a shocking 21 percen

Executive bonuses!

CaptainShuddup says

I get them all the time.

I'll use one pay it off in 18 months, but by then another company sends me another 0percent offer, so I've never ever, had to actually use one after the 0% introductory teaser rate expires.

Doesn't that hurt your credit score changing credit cards all the time?

JH says

This is exactly the kind of mentality that allowed the housing bubble, and allows credit card companies to skim billions from the economy.

Hahahahaha, another funny statement. How is shuffling a balance (much less one's annual income) at 0% APR even close to comparable to taking out an adjustable rate loan (10 times one's annual income) at 3-5% APR?

Both encourage you to live on credit. At the individual level everyone thinks they're ok. The guy with adjustable rate mortgage thinks he will refinance when needed.
And maybe they are ok - most of the time.

At the aggregate level, this has disastrous effects on the stability of the economy, as the country borrows from the future.

You're just trained to think as a speculator.

lakermania says

Doesn't that hurt your credit score changing credit cards all the time?

Not if you have a really good credit score, and every card is courting you. When you don't have many options, that's when these card companies seem to screw people the most. People trying to build their finances, before they buy a house, and a more stable house. Are the very people who seem to be the most loyal to these banks. I don't know if it's really loyalty on those patrons part, who stick with them for year after years with higher interest rates, late fees, and dinging your credit score every time you break wind.

Or it's because the bank makes damn sure they don't have other options.

They really make it hard to ever get ahead in the first place. But it seems once you get past a certain credit threshold, all of those barriers seem to vanish. As long as you keep your credit current.

But then again, my wife likes to make charges on 0% interest cards, pay the very minimal for 16 to 17 months, then settle the whole balance before then. I guess the other card companies, and often the same bank with competing card offers, notice the pay off more than what's really going on with how we're using our card. So we'll get a hundred offers for 0% no fees and other perks.

I wouldn't even use credit cards, if there was a yearly fee, and we paid interest on cards, like it took to build credit to buy a house.

sbh says

We're all used to CIC having little to say besides rah, rah red team and HaHaHaHaHaHa. But it's truly disappointing when someone is unaware of Chinatown. Sigh.

He's not the same as you and me. He doesn't dig poetry. He's so unhip that when you say Dylan, he thinks you're talking about Dylan Thomas, whoever he was. The man ain't got no culture.

CaptainShuddup says

lakermania says

Doesn't that hurt your credit score changing credit cards all the time?

Not if you have a really good credit score, and every card is courting you. When you don't have many options,

Mine has only increased using the carousel of cards (for rewards, not to transfer balances, although only a large balance would negatively impact your score). I open 2-3 new cards per year for rewards. I close most but keep a few long term cards. Now my score is over 800. Of course, it helps that my only late payments ever were in college and are now long gone...

I charge everything-even fast food. But all my cards are mileage and I fly a bit for work too and charge expenses too. So my vacation flights are usually free!! I pay the balance off every month though.

Heraclitusstudent says

Both encourage you to live on credit.

I understand what you're saying. But if I have $20k cash for a car or $1k cash for a couch, and someone is offering me 0% APR for 2-5 years, then I'm going to take the 0% any day. However, a BMW is outside my price range, as is a $700k house. So I'm not going to massively go into debt to buy either that I don't belong in.

There is a systemic problem with credit in US, especially in cities like LA, sure. But if someone can learn to transfer balances and/or reap rewards without it costing a penny, then I see nothing wrong with that.

Call it Crazy says

don't have $1.50 cash in their pocket to pay for it.... They swipe it on plastic...

1.5 miles, baby!

JH says

Mine has only increased using the carousel of cards

That's what happened to me as well. I don't transfer balances from card to card, I just pay off one. Then take the 0% offer card when send it. We only have one or two cards with a balance at anytime. One from my cards, and one from hers.
My wife is a stay at home Mom, and actually built her credit up before I did. So she has her own cards she keeps a few dollars on, so they close them for no activity. She does that, because rules are weirder than when she first started getting her collection of cards. If she was to let them all Close due to inactivity, She would have a hell of time getting new cards.

In the last 4 or 5 years, all of the new card offers have been addressed to me. Last decade they were courting her. But that was when they recognized people who were good at paying their bills and keeping up with their finances, they didn't deny women credit for being a stay at home mom like they do now.

Call it Crazy says

Dan8267 says

He's not the same as you and me.

Thank god for that, otherwise I'd throw myself in front of a moving truck...

And he still thinks we're talking about Dylan Thomas. Yet another reference he missed.

CaptainShuddup says

So she has her own cards she keeps a few dollars on, so they close them for no activity.

Ah, yeah, I think that is starting to happen to us, also. Assholes! They are phishing for people who they can collect 21% on. We have tried to keep our oldest cards open for the longevity thing but I think some have been closed randomly over the past few years.

CaptainShuddup says

My wife is a stay at home Mom

Mine is PT mom, PT work, but I think we always apply by reporting our household income...is that possible? I think so. She is less excited about the carousel, though, so we fight about whose card gets the purchases any given month. (She does the shopping so I have to convince her to use my cards haha.)

^^^

Seems much like bragging to me. Seems like you know lot about perma-bears then yourself. :)

The Professor says

We did not, and do not, need insurance reform. We need to cut out the bloodsucking middlemen whose sole purpose is to profit off of people being unhealthy.

Healthcare for all, not insurance reform.

Please don't confuse people who only use emotion (or simply repeat after rush limbaugh) to relate to issues by introducing logic. It's not fair.

sbh says

What if Bundy had been a deadbeat black man or native american?

Al Sharpton would still be in Nevada misusing big words.

curious2 says

I really don't understand what you are trying to say with that comment?

Liberals are saying (IF!!!!!!!!!!!!!!) Obama did screw up(and they aren't admitting that he did), then we should let it slide least you be branded a Racist by the Liberal ministry of Hate, Fear and Misinformation.

JH says

I am for 100% socialist or 100% free market health care. We are in a slimy middle ground, and the aca only secured that position.

If that were true, I mean really really true, then you would be one of one of the people that sees Obama as the lying sack of shit scumbag that he really is. And you wouldn't have one fucking nice thing to say about ACA.

AND For the fucking record! These problems haven't been around long before the ACA, we're in new Liberal lala land, my friend.
The world has never seen no SHIT like this.

Call it Crazy says

patients who were unhappily surprised by higher-than-expected deductibles and copayments

i.e., patients who cannot read.

CaptainShuddup says

Obama as the lying sack of shit scumbag

CaptainShuddup says

AND For the fucking record! These problems haven't been around long before the ACA, we're in new Liberal lala land, my friend.

Both problems have been around long before Jan 2009: lying shit scumbags in Washington and serious problems with healthcare.

Call it Crazy says

“When we told him that, he was angry at us. And, because of that, he didn't want to make another appointment to see me,”

Finally, natural selection has a chance in modern society.

Call it Crazy says

He was just looking for the FREE Obamacare insurance he was promised by voting for him....

Nobody wanted socialized (free) health care in 2009, remember? Now they do. Interesting.

Because it's hip / trendy / the bank allowed you to take the loan / financially responsible to pay 5, 7, or 10 times your households GROSS income on a "title" for a piece of real estate.

The 0% balance transfer offers were awesome when bank accounts paid 5-6%, but not so useful now.

PLEASE.

Let's see, I'm gonna listen to some two-bit bankruptcy lawyer who went to correspondence school and owns 3 crap shacks in Corncord over the former head economist at Morgan Stanley.

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-04-22/ex-morgan-stanley-chief-economist-admits-fed-distorting-markets

Watch the clip. It's very educational.

Call it Crazy says

Why??

Well, back then, you could get some 0% transfers with a 0% fee, so the arbitrage opportunity worked well. Now, what would you put it in that's safe and earns sufficient to matter? It's rare to get a 0% transfer for a 0% fee now, usually it's a 1-2% transfer with no fee or a 0% transfer with a 2-3% (or more) fee.

Inventory is up, but it is at the middle to higher end. Investors have turned many houses that would be available to first time buyers into rentals.

The trade-up market has not returned.

Facebooksux says

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-04-22/ex-morgan-stanley-chief-economist-admits-fed-distorting-markets

Watch the clip. It's very educational.

Sort of nonsense -- he blames everyone except Wall Street, of course.

Bubbabear says

...anyone living the dream is most certainly not visiting this site

Yep, there are handful of them here who tirelessly try to convince majority of the folks here to buy or to let them know that they missed the boat and they have a million $ in equity(assuming that most the folks here are losers with a few penny in liquid assets compared to their million $ on paper money). I wonder why that is? :)

corntrollio says

Facebooksux says

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-04-22/ex-morgan-stanley-chief-economist-admits-fed-distorting-markets

Watch the clip. It's very educational.

Sort of nonsense -- he blames everyone except Wall Street, of course.

Wall street's doing it, but it's enabled by the Fed's easy money.

The problem is not so much credit card usage itself, it's the citizens who carry a balance and get robbed by the usurious interest rates. I pay it all off every month without fail.

His Mom thought she was taking a dump rather than giving birth. If she hadn't accidentally yanked little Kim Jong-un out of the swirling water by the umbilical cord while walking away, we wouldn't be enjoying has radiant presence to this date.

That's why she always referred to fearless leader as her little dumpling.