A new reform bill known as Dodd Financial Reform Bill have been passed to give better protection to consumers. The bill mainly focuses on regulations for Wall Street, and gives more power to the Federal Reserve. Also a new monitoring institution has been designed to focus on the various credit and lending institutions.
The 5 Changes are:
The Federal Reserve introduced new credit card rules which will take effect from 22nd August, 2010. These rules will limit certain fees on the credit cards and also make it possible to decrease the interest rate. The new rules addresses not only credit cards, but have outlined some rules on gift cards too. These rules will be an addition to the rules on credit cards which were introduced on 22nd February, 2010. This Act will be called Credit Card Accountability, Responsibility and Disclosure (CARD) Act.
It’s great news that your cell phone can be doubled up as payment cards. According to recent reports Verizon and AT&T are together planning to bring a phone payment system, and are said to be tying up with T-Mobile to introduce smart phones as a replacement for your credit cards. In future you may be able to make your payments using your phone instead of your credit card.
A bill on medical debt has been introduced by Congresswoman Mary Jo Kilroy. This bill is going to be known as the Medical Debt Relief Act, 2010. However, this bill handles the issue of reporting of medical debts, mainly those that has been in collections, and has later been paid off.
New credit card laws have come into effect from February 22, 2010. These laws will provide protections to the customers (credit card holders) by limiting the increase in interest rates, setting rule to disclose all the details in simple language, minimizing unfair billing, and even limiting the ability of the college goers under 21 to get new credit cards. To counter this, the credit card companies have already hiked their fees much before the laws could come into effect.
Dealing with the collection agency (CA) is one of the most dreaded things for the debtors, since collection agencies are generally known to harass debtors for collecting debts. They call at any time, and threat the debtors over the phone. However, there are laws and various ways to deal with the collection agencies.
Pay day loans also known as cash advance loans or deferred deposit check loans are considered to be a good option to pay off debts in case of emergencies. It is popular because one can get immediate cash out of payday loans. However, the fees on payday loans are very high. Moreover as it’s quite easy to get a payday loan, it is very common for people to fall into payday loan traps. However there are ways to get out of a payday loan trap. The best way is to avoid getting payday loans.
Ways to get out of payday loan trap
Identity theft is a very popular crime and is getting at new victims everyday. There are measures you might take to prevent yourself from being a victim of identity theft. Here are a few ways:
Secured credit cards help you to build credit much easily than a regular credit card. It is even much easier to get with low credit score as compared to regular credit cards. In secured credit card, you need to deposit some amount of money before starting to use the card to make purchases. However, a secured credit card too has some fees included just as in a regular card, like application fees, processing fees and annual fees, etc.
The things that you should know before taking a secured credit card are:
The new rules on gift cards were issued by the Federal Reserve on 23rd March, 2010, especially to protect the consumers from problems faced by them while using gift cards. These rules apply to retail gift cards only, like the Discover gift card, MasterCard, American Express, and Visa gift cards, etc.