Mass Mailing fun

Heh, I thought, even from my experience, that US banks in general tend to be somehow better. Maybe it's also gotten worse, though. Honestly, for credit card, there's usually just one flat yearly fee (ranging from around $15) and, if you pay your bills on time, it doesn't cost you anything more at least. It's just tricky to even get one, you need quite high salary to be eligible, and trouble starts when you don't pay bills on time, meaning you pay those incredible 20% interest rates.

Debit cards are much more common around, and considerably easier to get, but normally you just get the electronic variety. Meaning they usually work in bigger shops in the same country, but using them abroad is kinda complicated and they don't work over internet at all. If you want embossed debit card, it's offten even more expensive then credit card, you need to have pretty high balance to get reasonable limit and, as much as I try to limit using card over the internet, I still feel kinda safer knowing that should somebody try to abuse my credit card number, those money don't at least go directly from my checking account. Admittedly, this effect is rather psychological.

Any card that requires you to pay an annual fee is bad news. They're also likely to gouge you on interest rates sooner or later.

I carry one card that's used for emergencies, although it had to be used recently to cover some moving expenses too.

Interest on those things can get you.

Any bank account around here carries monthly fees, and then various other assorted fees including fees for things such as every line printed on your monthly account statement (which you cannot sometimes even cancel), having money deposited to your account, and who knows what, so I am pretty much used to paying fees, unfortunatelly. In that regard, just owning my account (and I am not even talking about actually using it) costs more than owning credit card.

As for interest rates, in here, you just have to be smart. There's limited time at the end of yeach month (about 15 days) in which, if you pay everything from previous month, you don't get charged them (internet banking helps here a lot). In this way, I can have money borrowed from bank for periods of up to 45 days (technically, even more, since it takes a while for transaction to actually appear on the bill) without actually paying any interest rate on them - which I quite enjoy, and they full well deserve it.

There we go...

All pictures that were linked to codewarrior.binaryvibrance.net died when I switched from my home server to these guys, the picture has always been up at http://www.binaryvibrance.net/artwork/ with the rest of my public stuff.

Yeah, that's worse than around here. Our banks are engaged in a competition to see how low they can get fees on accounts to the extent that some banks are giving you money to start one with them. On the other hand, credit cards are a morass. I under stand that the big ones (visa, discover, etc., etc...) aren't too bad, but the little mall and grocery store ones are pure hell.