Tony Brewer

I am amazed by how many television commercials I see nowadays where the sponsor is a company that deals in cash advances of some kind.  Whether it is payday loans or  a loan against a car title, or a bad credit loan, the big business seems to be all about getting fast cash to the consumer.  What I find very irritating about the commercials is that the customers who are bragging about how they needed money and got it so easily, waving the money around.  They just seem to be very uneducated people!

And to be completely honest, those kinds of commercials simply turn me right off!    I don’t know what kind of commercial would entice me to use those services, but the ones that I see are pretty repulsive.  I understand that there are situations in which a consumer might need a quick loan, and that these types of loans are fairly easy to get, but I think that they could be promoted in a less distasteful way.

No doubt about it, people are trying to find as many ways as possible to save money.  Comparison shopping seems to be at an all-time high.  It is not unusual to overhear office conversations between co-workers about how they are trying to save money and find the best car insurance rate or the best price on groceries.  I can’t recall a time when people have been paying such close attention to how they are spending their money.

One of the most convenient “modern inventions” that I use is the computer and Internet to pay almost all of my bills online.  I have a great software program that helps me to keep track of my income and expenses, and reminds me when to pay my bills.  I have set up a lot of them to be automatically deducted from my bank account or credit card, but some won’t allow me to do that.  So I use either my bank’s billpay service (which is free) or go to the website of the biller to authorize payment from my bank account.  In almost every case, the service is free.  It’s convenient and it saves me postage, the cost of envelopes, and the cost of buying (and the hassle of writing) checks.  It also eliminates the chance of the check being stolen from mail box and subjected to check washing!  Yes, I really like paying bills online.  I like the security and convenience, as well as the economy of doing that.

I keep hearing on the news almost every day about how the consumers are having trouble with their credit cards.  So many of the credit card companies are arbitrarily raising people’s interest rates, or cancelling their cards, or lowering their limits.  People are being warned that this kind of thing could happen to anyone, and people are starting to panic over how this is going to have a negative effect on their credit score.

If our economy is going to improve, we can’t put up with this kind of treatment!  We need to take the time to compare credit cards and get the best deal we can get.  I’ve recently opened up a No Interest Credit Card account that I found by using the comparecards.com website.  I’m going to make sure to use it at least once a month to ensure that it is not cancelled due to non-use.  I have good credit, and I hope that I will be able to hold onto my credit cards!  But, if I run into snags, I know there are places I can go to try to get good deals on other cards!