pocketmint

Tag: credit cards

1. Credit cards (part three): use ’em … and lose ’em anyway

   7 August 2009

   It was a brief segment on NPR’s Marketplace last month that alerted me to the newest scary thing about credit cards: banks have begun to curtail or withdraw credit based on where you shop and what you buy. Here’s one example: consumer Kevin Johnson had his credit line slashed by two-thirds despite a stellar credit [...]

2. Credit cards (part two): use ’em or lose ’em

   17 July 2009

   As I mentioned in part one, for the last two years Jak and I have been using a single credit-card account, a Costco Amex card with cash-back rewards, for all our credit-card needs. (When a merchant doesn’t take American Express, we use the debit MasterCard for our joint checking account.) This makes record-keeping easy. At [...]

3. Credit cards (part one): the game is changing

   12 July 2009

   I’ve just about had it with credit cards. Like most people of my generation, I got my first card in college. Then, and for the next twenty years, getting credit was deceptively easy. I used it in all the typical foolish ways: to pay bills during periods of unemployment, to finance an unsustainable small business, [...]