2013年1月15日 星期二

Will Your Credit Card Outlast Your Marriage?

Will you be sticking with your credit card longer than your spouse? For some Americans,Product information for Avery Dennison cable ties products. the answer will be "yes." Overall, we are are pretty faithful to our plastic. According to Experian, the average time a credit card account remains open is approximately 129 months -- or 10.75 years.

Contrast that with the fact that the U.S. Census Bureau reports that in 2009, first marriages that ended in divorce lasted a median of 8 years for men and women overall. The median time from marriage to separation was shorter -- about 7 years.

It appears that Americans are also more loyal to their cards than their counterparts across the pond. Research by MoneySupermarket found that credit card users in the U.K. have remained loyal to their card provider for six years on average.

Is loyalty to a card issuer good or bad? On the plus side, holding on to your cards for a long time may help your credit rating. FICO High Achievers-- those with FICO scores of 785 or above -- opened their oldest credit card account 25 years ago on average; and the average credit account is 11 years old. Plus, if you've been a good customer for many years you may be able to negotiate a lower interest rate or get a fee waived more easily than a new customer.

On the other hand, issuers are trying to woo new new customers with flashy promotions, such as the Starwood Preferred Guest Card from American Express that currently allows new cardholders to earn 10,000 points after their first purchase,We offers several ways of providing hands free access to car parks to authorised vehicles. and 15,000 points after spending $10,000 within six months. Just try matching the British Airways credit card 100,000 miles sign-up bonus with your current card. Fat chance it even comes close.

Perhaps the best strategy is to plan on a long-term relationship with your cards, and choose accordingly. But check in periodically to make sure they still offer you the best deal. If not, let them know you think you can do better -- and why. They may be able to able to come up with a reason for you to stay.

If not, and you do break up with your credit card company, you don't have to end the relationship completely. You can still keep the account open in case you decide you want to come back later. Just think of it as keeping your options open.

Clicking on the store card pass type, my next task was to create a name for the template, determine if I wanted to use a public certificate or upload a private certificate, type in an organization name and pass description, and then determine if I wanted to use an auto-generated serial number or enter my own number. For the last item, I selected "Entered at pass creation" since I just wanted to create a card with my unique number on it.

PassKit's online Pass Designer takes you step by step through the process of creating the card. The next step has you choose colors and images -- I chose to use the same orange that IKEA used for their plastic card, and grabbed a copy of their logo to emblazon on the front. There's a spot for a picture -- or as they call it, a strip image -- so I nabbed a picture from IKEA's website of some living room furniture to adorn that place on the card.

Next, you are moved to a page where you enter in content for several different areas. Here, the only thing I really wanted was the card number and a bar code.We mainly supply professional craftspeople with wholesale turquoise beads from china. As I mentioned earlier, the bar code won't work. It looks like our buddies at IKEA use a standard Code 39 bar code (I may be wrong...) but the app generates only PDF417, Aztec and QR codes. No matter -- at least I got the card number on the front of my virtual pass.

You can also add back content -- here, I set the pass up for automatic updates and told it to show up on the lock screen when I am near my local IKEA. I also added a warning on the back to not let the cashier scan the bar code. Under a locations tab in the interactive Pass Designer, you can also choose to have a notification show up when you're near a location, so I have it say "Welcome back to IKEA Centennial" when I'm there.

Finally, I chose English only since I'm the only user of this pass, and to also issue only one copy of the pass. To get rid of the 14-day pass lifetime, I paid a token fee of US$0.99 to PassKit via PayPal. With a click on a pass URL, I was able to install the pass to Passbook where it now resides, awaiting my next visit to IKEA for Swedish meatballs and Dryck Bl?b?r. Oh, and buying $140 worth of things I didn't know I needed until I showed up at the store.

Hopefully, IKEA and those other stores I still have physical cards for will get on the Passbook bandwagon soon and let me sign up for a virtual pass. In the meantime, PassKit is a fun and easy way to make your own passes and put your wallet on a diet.

I find it very ironic that when there was a Republican president, the Democrat leaders in Congress were very vocal about their not wanting to raise the debt ceiling one iota. However, now that one of their own party is in the Presidential office, they are 100% in favor of raising it. My point in this bit of financial history is that many Americans are in debt and trying to get out of debt. We cannot visit our credit card companies and ask for our debt ceilings to be raised. I think it is time for the U. S. government to get their financial house in order. Go through all departments, trim out the unnecessary jobs, the unnecessary projects, and get spending down across the board to what the government actually can spend. As humorist Dave Berry once wrote, the person in charge of all U. S. government spending should be a single mom who has raised 5 or more kids. She knows how to tell a kid no, we can’t afford those tennis shoes. She would certainly be able to tell a Senator that no, he can’t have that $15 million for his state to study methane gas produced by dairy cows! My husband and I regularly go over our budget to determine if we need to scale back spending in any areas, and try to increase savings too. I don’t understand why the government can’t do that also.

Agenda two: Spending, spending, spending. This concept is very logical. Do not spend more money than you have! Ah, but then there is that rectangular plastic card that lets one do just that. Years ago,We can supply howo truck products as below. when I was about to venture off to college, my dad sat me down to have a “financial talk”. My dad is a pretty logical thinker and he told me his theory on credit cards. That if at the end of the month, I found that I wouldn’t be able to pay the bill, that I should then take my credit card and destroy it, cut it up and throw it away.Our aim is to supply air purifier which will best perform to the customer's individual requirements. He said people not being able to pay their credit card bill at the end of the month causes a lot of problems if those folks keep on using that credit card and then they start to rack up higher and higher debts on it. Our government should listen to my dad!

Agenda three and then I am out: Taxes. I don’t have as much to write about taxes and Mark Twain‘s pithy saying is so appropriate about there being two certainties in this life, death and taxes. I did read an article a month ago, that the increase on the 1% of wealthiest Americans, a so-called punish the heiress, i.e. Paris Hilton, tax would have a very detrimental effect on those farmers and ranchers who own land and a family farm that they want to pass on to their children who want to keep running the family farm. The increased tax the heirs would have to pay would be exorbitantly high, and those family farms will have to be sold instead of passed on to the heirs, which is very sad. I think that example shows how the government tries to come up with a new project or plan, hoping to do so for the public’s good, but all the public is really left with are unintended consequences. As Milton Friedman once said, “Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program.” I understand why a government collects taxes and why citizens should pay them. But it sticks in my craw to know that the taxes our family pays are spent on frivolous pork, i.e. wasteful government programs. Remember the GSA debacle in Las Vegas? That cost we the taxpayers $ 823,000, at least!

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