1230 Forever Interest

A while back Congress passed legislation on how Bankcard companies treat their customers. Like they are now prevented from soliciting young people, offering them low initial interest rates, and then lowering the boom when the kids are slow with their first payment.
You know...college kids always do stuff on time.
Um, can you say cramming?
The law also addresses how credit card bills look. The new ones have to clearly say your interest rate, what it will finally cost you when you pay the balance off, and most importantly, how long it will take to pay off if you only make the minimum payment.
The law presumes people would pay more if they only knew what a sucking whirlpool minimum payments were.
Yeah. And people wouldn’t eat that cheesecake if they knew how many calories it had.
One interesting thing about the new system is that banks have had to program their computers to do different calculations. And like all things computer, this can lead to confusion.
Computers don’t think, they just spit out results.
So I just got a bill for an account I paid off. The computer told me in newly correct legal language that my minimum payment was $0.00. Then it said, “If no additional charges are made, and you make only the minimum payment each month, we estimate you will never pay off the balance shown on this statement.”
Pure computer thinking; logically consistent with no bearing on reality. If I owe 0.00, and I pay 0.00, I will never pay 0.00 off.
I hope one of the hidden agendas of the new law wasn’t to eliminate credit card engendered stress.
Because man. Never is a really long time to have a 0.00 payment hanging over my head...
America, ya gotta love it.