about credit cards...

During the times of the 1980s when Credit Cards first came into fashion, it seemed that only the rich and glamourous seemed to be able to use them on a frequent basis.

I remember one of my best friends getting her first platinum card from American Express back in 98 and it still seemed like such a luxury.

How times have changed. My dad wrote some harsh words several months ago about financial institutions - banks, and how their image has change dramatically over the years in his eyes.

An example of this would be when I canceled my Citibank card two and a half years ago. It all seemed fine and dandy till about six months ago when I was in the UK and my dad received a statement about paying my membership fees.

Being Mr. Worry, dad called me up instantly informing me off this, worried that if I don't solve this problem ASAP, I will soon be charged excess monthly.

To avoid such a scenario, I quickly resurfaced previous faxes to the bank - scanned it for emailing purposes, wrote a new letter of complaint to fax, email and POST (to be sure) to TWO different addresses and fax numbers. Such was the hassle that my father has since lost so much confidence in the banking institutions that fear strikes him as he receives any letters from them.

The second example was when I canceled my HSBC credit card a year ago. Again, because of the complexity of the system (I used to repay my mortgage through HSBC - and I have a savings account with them) I had to return to the branch office to cancel the cards.

Thinking that it has all been sorted I was shocked to receive a new statement as my second address stating I still owed them an outstanding amount of RM0.15

Knowing that if I didn't fulfill this payment and straightened out the problem I may actually owe them a total of RM60 across the period of one year - I stormed straight to my hometown branch and gave their staff a rightful bullocking.

It turned out that when I closed my account - by some default I had owed them that measly amount. It started to give me the impression that banks WERE really baying for our blood. That their function of existence was really to suck us dry off our money...