I cut up my Mastercard

As much as I love the Mastercard priceless commercials, I severed my ties with the company about 12 months ago.

I first got the Mastercard many moons ago, as a result of getting an interest free finance deal and paying it out early, they sent me a pre approved application form, Just Sign Here Sir, It was far too easy.

Now with my best intentions, I only got the card for emergencies. It was provided by a company called AGC finance who used to owned by Westpac Bank, but was sold off to the massive GE Money.

I didnt want to use it, but as usual life happens and it took a hammering right up to it’s $2,500 credit limit.

I didnt actually pay off this credit card, but took a limit increase on one of my Visa gold cards and transferred the balance.

Why did I do this? for a start it reduced my interest on the balance by 5% per annum, secondly I’d seen some media reports on the GE Money company and I didn’t like there business practices.

They offer personal loans, then build in some extra fee’s and insurances, and before you’ve made the first payment you already owe 20% more than you originally borrowed. The thing was that they buried the details of the fee’s and insurances into the fine print and unless you sat down and read through the plethora (one of my favourite words) of paperwork you didn’t know about it until you’d signed your life away.

A trick they tried on me was offering insurance to pay my credit card if I lost my job for any reason, but as always the demons are in the fine print, I can’t remember the details but I think the “insurance premium” was 1% of my monthly balance….. each month, ie 12%pa. So if I kept the card sitting on it’s rev limiter I would be paying $300 a year for this insurance. I pay less than that to insure my entire house contents and that’s more than 20 times my maximum limit on my credit card.

Also buried in the details was that the insurance would only pay the minimum monthly payment while I was completly without a job, even though the lovingly crafted letter told me how they would pay my credit card while I was out of work.

P%$s off I say.
In fact I also say never to obtain finance with GE Money, if you don’t have your eyes open you’ll end up deeper in debt than you started.