May 1, 2005

If you have ever been hit with a late payment charge by your credit card, you will in no doubt felt more than a touch of anger at the level of the charges that has stealthily been added to your account and you will be also be a little more than unhappy with yourself that you let it happen.

"most of the time we don’t realise that we are going to be hit with these charges"

Well don’t be so hard on yourself, as most of the time we don’t realise that we are going to be hit with these charges, that’s why the term “Stealth Charges” is an appropriate way of describing them and it is just down to the greed of the credit card companies or banks involved. All of this has come on the back of credit card debt, which is rising at a rate that will soon be un-controllable, with in the region of £60 billion of the £180 billion of Britain’s unsecured debt accrued by it’s customers.

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So what is getting done about the need for greed within the credit card industry? Well for a start the Office of Fair Trading has opened up an investigation into the fees that the card issuers are charging and have up till now discovered, that the charges that being made are of “Questionable Validity” and with the issuers of the from the banks to credit card companies, not willing to indulge to us what sort of cash that they are making from these fees, then this tells you and I that the silence that has come from them, tells it’s own story.

"The banks use a 4 day clearing period for cheques"

The trouble also is that there does not seem to be any leeway or give when it comes to dealing with any payments received. An example being if you have say sent a cheque to cover the amount due 4 days before the payment was due, you would think that that’s that paid and think nothing more of it. Well let me let you into a little secret, you have sent your cheque 4 days before and it arrives at your credit card issuer the next day, it’s arrived on time right! Wrong! The banks use a 4 day clearing period for cheques, so the cheque you sent and they received on time, is now one day late because payment is not deemed to be paid until the cheque has cleared, leaving you with a £25 penalty for being ONE DAY late.

They will probably hit you with all the usual piffle, that the amount of the charge is down to the cost of administrating the letter that has been sent out to you in regards to the penalty fee, this is pure nonsense as well because surely a letter that is automatically sent from a computer to inform of us of this, does not cost the princely sum of £25.