Have you noticed the commercials of credit card companies lately?
The usual taglines of:
“Don’t leave home without it”
“What’s in your wallet”.
are as popular as Bernie Madoff in New York.
More people are now singing the jingle of freecreditreport.com instead.
We consumers are leaving home with credit card-lite wallets!
In addition, the card companines are discouraging credit expenditure by cutting credit line limits without warning!
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Would you believe that you the consumer sent a powerful message to the credit card financial institutions by paying down credit card debt by $6B from November to December of last year!
Even with this pay down, the economic tsunami is still wreaking havoc as credit card delinquency grew by 5.9% in January after the Christmas season.
Even the gold standard of credit cards, American Express has seen 11% quarterly loss.
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What’s in are debit cards, being promoted heavily by Visa and MasterCard. Both these companies are doing quite well, growing nearly 30% in income in the last quarter. Why, they make monies for each transaction you make as they are really middlemen (toll collector function in the financial highway) between you and the bank who owns the debt, banks such as Citi, Chase, etc.
Look to experience commercials from these institutions on how they are helping us “outsmart these tough times”.
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Here is the latest snapshot on how US consumers are paying for our transactions.
Debit cards 37%
Cash 29%
Credit cards 22%
Checks 12%
* I thank Beth Bulik of Adage for the research data.
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As Easter approaches, my mind goes back to many moons prior, a time where I went with mom in January to the department store to pick out my next coat. Come Springtime with eagerness, we made a second trip, to pick up that new item. Yes, mom used lay-away!
