Bank of America = Awful

I really could not think of a better title for this so I kept it very simple. I just watched a few videos on YouTube that have reached top rankings and center around the theme “Debtors Revolt Begins Now.”

Basically it’s a bunch of people very upset with Bank of America charging an APR of around 35% on their credit card accounts and they are angry.

This confuses me tremendously.

First, I am no friend of Bank of America but I play by the rules. The reasons I hate Bank of America are:

1. In 2008, every time I went in to deposit my check they hit me up for a credit card. AND every single time I asked them to please stop doing that. Sure enough it never ended. They would look up my account, put a surprised look on their face and say “OH, Mr. Curtin, you are eligible for a credit account with us!”

No matter how many times I denied, they tried to keep selling it to me until I confronted them and the clerk replied with, “Maybe the next time you’ll look into the details!
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So badgering me wasn’t enough, they had to be rude as well.

2. When activating the debit cards for me and my wife on the phone the automated prompt told me how I should be very afraid of the boogeyman and buy the Theft Identity Protection Service. I pushed the number corresponding to “No.” Then the prompt IMPLORED ME TO “NOT LET THE CRIMINALS TAKE AWAY WHAT I HAD WORKED SO HARD FOR.”

The prompt was actually begging me to buy a service!!! To say the least this annoyed me. I imagined if this was even real or if I had been transported to absurd land where nothing makes sense and money just flies out of my wallet for services that are unneeded. What I heard was “GIVE US MORE OF YOUR MONEY.”

Now for the debtors on YouTube.

Let me understand this properly. You have taken out a loan to buy something with money that is not yours. You are angry because the banks have changed the agreement which in the fine print they are able to take as much as they want from you should you owe a balance.
I understand this makes you very angry but you should have known that in a Capitalist society the point is to make money, not give it away. What they are doing is called “Usury,” and has caused all sorts of havoc throughout history. There is nothing in the agreement which talks about “fairness.”

There used to be a time when people spent money they had or even saved it. Now the society has become about spending everything and when that isn’t enough, people are borrowing to spend. The problem is society keeps telling us to spend and unconsciously we trust the system, the sales pitches and agree that everything is a “good deal.” We learned to trust the system and bought everything.

It is now time to start using our heads. The first thing to do is to stop spending. Money going into the wallet = good, money going out of the wallet = bad and if this is not the case it is time to quit that game. Start playing the game when your assets go up, your liabilities go down. Society tells us we need this and need that. We do not need any of that junk.

Should borrowing be absolutely needed, credit cards are the WORST way to do it unless you know how to play the game to win. I pay with my Amex for most things then pay off the entire amount every month. To the credit card companies, I’m known as a dead beat, the worst type of customer because they do not make any money off me. Actually, they pay me money with the cash back program!

The reason cash back is successful is they know people will not control their spending, get into debt and then have to pay the interest on the loan. They are using human greed to make a profit. It’s time to play the game differently. Spend only what you have, pay by credit card, and let the company pay you.

Therefore, the companies can charge me an APR of 10 billion percent if they want. I don’t care because they won’t ever make any money off of me. As for BofA, I lend them money in terms of a CD and now can make money off of them!

I often hear that people have to pay a lot of bills and that is the reason for not having any money. But what is a bill? It doesn’t just magically appear for no reason! It is a request for payment for some service or good. The trick is to ask ourselves if we really need that service or good, could we get it cheaper or perhaps just do without it completely.

Coming back to America I found that there is intense pressure to continually spend and fees for everything. It was almost too easy to spend money. However, the country I was coming from was Vietnam and those folks know how to save! In fact, a good part of the population do not even use banks! Therefore, if the bank told me there was a fee for this and a fee for that I looked at them like they had three heads. Then they kept telling me about services that magically appeared out of nowhere and gave me no tangible benefit. As for Identity Theft, my logic was if you lose my money that is your problem not mine. What I am hearing is that it is safer to keep my money under my mattress at home?

When I replied with keeping money under my mattress the clerk got a deer in the headlights look and wasn’t sure how to respond. I do take reasonable care as well to check my balance, guard my cards as though they were gold bars and make sure nobody suspicious is around me when I’m at the ATM.

In my opinion, we should take care of ourselves and not trust the system to do it for us. That is why people who borrow money then get upset over the terms make no sense to me.