Word: rating
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...most unsavory practices, a piece of legislation that President Obama has said he wants on his desk by the end of the month. The bill, which builds on rules issued by the Federal Reserve Board and other agencies at the end of last year, would do away with interest-rate hikes on existing balances, prohibit issuers from putting customer payments toward lower-rate balances first and abolish the practice of raising a customer's interest rate because he was late paying a bill to someone else...
...Consider the teaser rate. More than a third of consumers pick one credit card over another based on which issuer has the lowest introductory interest rate. And yet people often do so in a way that leaves them with higher finance charges over time. In one study, University of Maryland economists Haiyan Shui and Lawrence Ausubel watched people pick a card with a teaser rate of 4.9% for six months over a card with a teaser rate of 7.9% for 12 months. That would make sense if the people then paid off their balances within six months. But many didn...
...looking at that and similar findings. They see a systematic psychological breakdown - as a species we're just really bad at understanding costs that come later on. Instead, we assign a disproportionate amount of importance to what's immediate and tangible. We lock eyes with that initial low rate and can't look away. (And, yes, credit-card companies get that...
...same thing with that laundry list of fees that come with cards. We think that we're not going to be the ones to go over our credit limit or miss a payment and trigger a penalty rate, so we give those fees little to no weight as we're deciding which card to sign up for - even though they eventually make a big difference in what we pay. "We don't tend to take into account future costs," says Oren Bar-Gill, a law professor at New York University who has studied credit-card contracts and customer behavior. "Consumers...
Sexual assault cases in the military have risen significantly in recent years as well. A Pentagon report released earlier this year said 165 cases of sexual assault were reported among troops serving in Afghanistan and Iraq in 2008, up 26% from the year before. The overall incident rate was up 8% among U.S. service members serving worldwide, with 2,923 cases of sexual assault reported. U.S. military officials have stressed that some of the rise in the figures may be attributable to an increase in the reporting of incidents but acknowledged that the trend was troubling in any case...