An Australian consumer advocate group, Choice, has released information from a study carried out on 20 credit card companies here in Australia.

It showed that the amount of interest charged on a credit card varies greatly between providers, (when the provider starts and stops charging interest  and how fairly they apply the interest free days as actually advertised interest rate).

The fairer credit card providers were shown to be Heritage building society, Bendigo Bank, Certain GE cards, and Teachers Credit Union, while the most unfair credit card providers mentioned in the study were  , American Express (no surprises here) Commonwealth Bank, Bankwest, ANZ, and also Westpac.

The tricks of the Banking trade make it very difficult ,if not nearly downright impossible for the consumer to compare the merits and relative benefits of competing credit card providers credit cards as the headline interest rate is only part of the story.Most credit card companies backdate the interest rate to the purchase date , if your repayment on the credit card is late (this means that if you’re one day late you will pay the whole interest amount on the preceding 55 days) or even if you might under pay by a slight amount (ie:- if you make any shortfall,even as low as $5.00) and if this happens on an amount of ,say,$2500.00 that is really going to hurt. Consumers would be very surprised to know that if they had 2 credit cards with exactly the same interest rates and used them in the same way,(similar purchase amounts  and repayments of interest etc) they could be charged twice as much interest on one credit card for overdue interest than on the other.

Mr. Azine from the consumer group, Choice has called on all credit card providers to use the same charging methods, he says it’s a simple matter of tweaking their respective systems to employ a faired systems, but he also states that while most customers of the credit card providers don’t understand  the tricks being played on them , they will inevitably continue.(so, this means that the customers themselves also need to be aware of the finer details in their contracts).

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Regards

Brent.T

http://www.thehowto.net

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