Howard's Views

NO CHECK BOOK, NO BALANCE?

It's to the benefit of the Credit Card Cartel that the teaching of basic arithmetic is so poor in this country today.  The children all wear shoes, so although they may have their fingers to count on, this only gets them from one to ten and many don't seem to know how to do that!  If they were allowed to remove their shoes they'd have ten toes as well and that would enable them to go as far as twenty, which would be a great help in this day and age.  Here, however, the State does interferes and will not permit our children to go shoeless.  That makes real progress almost impossible, which seems rather unfortunate, doesn't it?

Basic arithmetic enables one to balance a checkbook, which is most helpful for those who wish to stay within a budget.  Yet, that too has become elusive to many as they depend more and more upon the banks that issue credit cards to do that for them.  They readily accept all those deductions of interest and penalties, plus the assorted little understood additional phony charges such as AOL or Yahoo Small Business that might mysteriously appear among the others.  Once there, they seem to hard to erase, like the moles or gophers in a garden, and require numerous telephone calls to obtain an explanation and/or credit.

All this works to the advantage of the credit card companies.  I've written the story of Amalia (click here to visit) and her long battle with AOL. There are hundreds of thousands of such stories, but then I'm mistaken, millions of them.

But, back to checks.  If you pay by check and keep track of your balance, you'll be a lot better off than you will if you charge every single little purchase to your credit card, increasing your balance a bit each month and thus . . . your interest payments.  When your checkbook balance gets down to your last fifty, you know you've got to rein in expenses.  With a credit card you are apt to keep on spending and spending.  That, of course, if what they want you to do.

Banks of today are often predatorial, as I will show you on an accompanying page.  A Debit Card?  That's your ticket to perdition, the access that YOUR bank wants to your money, and believe me, if you go to the following page, you'll see a perfect example of it.

MEMBERS OF THE CREDIT CARD CARTEL (SOME, NOT ALL)