Almost three months ago in mid December, I wrote a post about my concerns that people’s credit card limits were suddenly being slashed.  Well, it’s good the mainstream news eventually gets around to covering issues that are happening in real people’s lives, so that the masses can be warned. Here’s a recent article now being featured at the top of Yahoo news as of today.

Take a look at this to see what’s going on – by the time the mainstream news covers something, it’s usually not anything new, but so prevalent that it’s a major issue for a lot of people.   This article makes it sound a lot more mild than it actually is, since a huge number of people facing this scenario aren’t able to quickly pay off their cards or reduce their spending to below their limits, making for massive fees (note that no one in that situation was featured).  The article didn’t mention that credit card companies are also suddenly drastically raising interest rates, something that should be of concern to anyone who doesn’t pay off their accounts in full each month.  If you are still heavily dependent on your credit cards, please, start weaning yourself off of them immediately.

Also, I think it’s prudent to keep an eye on your credit card account just in case there’s a sudden policy change that takes effect.  Don’t think you’ll get any warning.  For the last few months I’ve been checking mine twice a month instead of just once (an online account makes this easy), because getting a bill that shows lots of unexpected fees isn’t fun, and neither is trying to argue with a credit card company representative to have them refund those fees.  Prevention is the best cure, and forewarned is forearmed!

Avivah