It’s a very good idea to keep all of your credit card receipts so you can check them against your statement when it arrives. If you have any questions about any charges, you should call right away. Mistakes are made and if you don’t catch them right away, they will be lost forever.
Check you balance so you can see how much wiggle room you have. Are there any changes? Have your rates gone up? Of course the ideal is to pay off your card every month. If you are only paying the minimum, you could be running up quite a debt.
One of the most important things to check for is extra charges. When credit card companies want to steal from you, and they do want to steal from you every chance they get, the best way to do it is to place illegal charges on your card. How do they do that without you noticing?
If you look at your credit card statement, there may be a place where special charges are listed. In my statement it is down to the left in a place you would never look and should never have to look. What are these charges? Two of my cards were charging a late fee of $29 even though people’s payments were not really late. One man ended up sending his payment by Fed Ex the day he got it. They still charged him a late fee.
The other illegal charge is usually for some service you didn’t want and didn’t order. In the case of these companies, it was their credit card protection racket. They charged an additional $29 for that whether you ordered it or not. So they were charging each cardholder nearly $60 extra each month. I wouldn’t have noticed it myself if I hadn’t seen something about it on TV.
The companies were being investigated. I immediately went to my latest statement and there were the two extra $29 charges. The banks were ripping their customers off for millions of dollars. The problem with these cases, even though they amount to out-and-out theft, is they never get prosecuted. There will be a class action suit. The bank will pay off the suit, giving the lawyers a fortune and spreading the rest among the cardholders.
The crumbs that the cardholder receives will be a few dollars or less, nothing near what they actually lost. The company denies any wrongdoing and the lawyers and company CEO’s go off and have a drink together. I received a check for one of these class action lawsuits and I kept it. I may frame it. It was for ONE CENT!
God Bless America and the Crooks who are in charge.