Re: Credit Cards

Interesting thing about bankruptcy law. Like most of our man-made laws, this one was once again revised recently, they came up with some kind of catchy name that the average person does not see beyond, don't remember what it was called but the new version of this law makes it significantly more difficult for the average person to file for bankruptcy. Close to the same time, some other "laws" were revised. One of them, I think they call it something snazzy like Check 21 or something like that, allows creditors (banks, utility companies, basically anyone people regularly make bill payments with) to immediately (via electronics) have access to the funds paid to them as soon as they recieve the the checks you write and send to them. IE> this is attempting to further whittle down what some people consider the kiting time, or check floating time.

On the flip side, when it comes to a matter of these creditors when they need to send or reimburse funds back to you, guess how long the law allows before these funds are made available to you Joe and Joesephine citizen? Just an example, by mistake I made an over payment to a credit card company late last year, it took them close to 11 weeks to finally make these funds available to me in the form of a reimbursement check. Yes, I held out for 11 weeks resisting their efforts to get me to spend this surplus by using my card to buy things I did not need. :)

For those of you who balance your check books, you may have noticed that many of the checks you write are now not as easy to confirm as to when they clear, reason being, creditors taking advantage of this law (many of them do not, yet, takes them time to ramp up to the new law) now cause these checkes to be transacted as a generic "withdrawl" rather than a specific check transaction. All of this particular recent banking/credit law was capped off by the credit card industry as a whole pretty much doubling the amount of minimum monthly payment they now require.......co-incidence?

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