Credit Card Companies - Are You Listening?!

Here is the slimyest thing that credit card companies do IMHO: [Are you guys listening?]

 

They used to use a 30-day grace period window to both calculate when your interest is due and to determine when your next payment was due. NOW, most of them have a 25-day grace period. Here is a direct quote:

"You have 25 days to repay your balance for purchases before a finance charge on purchases will be imposed. If the new balance is not paid in full within 25 days, a finance charge will apply to both the balance remaining (including current billing cycle transactions) and to all transactions during succeeding billing cycles until the new balance is paid in full."

 

So what does that mean?

• They earn more interest
• People are late more often due to the sliding due date and they get more exorbitant late fees
• Worst one: Your bill is due at a different time each month

This is inconvenient on so many levels -- such as, you cannot use the online Billpay that your bank offers (in most cases).

But here is the worst thing -- like most people, my mortgage payment is due at the beginning of the month, and I get paid bi-weekly. So the first paycheck of the month gets eaten into a lot more than the second (due to the mortgage payment). But when the credit card bills migrate into the first half of the month, then I owe so much in the first half that there is little left until the next paycheck. It makes it very difficult to plan expenses this way!

I would rather pay a small annual fee to get a consistent pay date -- of my choice -- than to worry about having money the first half of any given month. I'm not sure if any provider even offers this; in fact, when I tried to search for this at creditcards.com and MSN MoneyCentral, there search criteria did not even let me search for it. (I wonder why?)

Here is an interesting related article.