At first glance, this sounds like a whole new level of invasion of privacy on behalf of CompuCredit, but if you stop and think about it a bit, isn’t that what all the credit card companies do (by extension)? Sure, currently credit card companies can raise your rates if you miss payments. And there’s also the dreaded Universal Default which can trigger increases on cards other than the one you missed the payments on. They can and do track your spending, and can easily tell when you go on spending sprees. The difference here is that CompuCredit has done something proactive about it. The reason they’re in trouble is that they have raised rates and curtailed credit limits based solely on the spending habits of their customers. That’s a step farther than most card companies have been going. The reason they’re in trouble is they didn’t disclose the practice to the customer. Not that the DID the practice, but they didn’t TELL the people it would happen.

Can You Afford the Lifestyle of the Rich and Famous?

Too many people use their credit cards a supplement for their lifestyle, living the ‘good’ life and putting it on plastic. The part where most people get into trouble is living beyond their means. As Dave Ramsey is fond of saying;

"If your income is less than your outgo, your upkeep will become your downfall."

Living beyond your means is the double-edged sword that credit card companies love. On the one hand, if you continually spend more than you make, you run up the revolving credit amount, which equates to more interest (and profits) for them. But on the down side, if you run up too much, you’re likely to default and either stop paying (causing litigation) or declare bankruptcy (forcing a write-off by the companies). It’s in their best interest to ‘manage’ you and make sure that you’re in their ’sweet-spot’ of spending; More than you make, but less than you can afford to pay in minimum payments.

CompuCredit specialized in sub-prime lending, meaning their credit cards targeted the riskier spenders, and carried a correspondingly higher interest rate. More risk, but more reward. To make sure they were actually making that necessary profit, they took the additional step of being proactive about watching their customers’ spending habits, and modifying the credit limits accordingly. If Joe Irresponsible suddenly goes out and spends $5000 in a week, where in the past he’s never spent more than $500, that might be signs of something brewing.

The part where they got in trouble (according to the report) is in the marketing of the card. They didn’t tell the customers that spending habits would adversely affect their credit, and that’s what they’re in trouble for.

Singling Out the Weakest in the Pack

It isn’t unusual for the credit card companies to monitor purchases. I can remember when I was younger and just starting out, I purchased some plane tickets, and a new bicycle ($700, I was really into cycling then) on the same day. Even though I was nowhere NEAR my limit, I still had to have a 15-20 minute discussion with the credit card company at the bike shop explaining why I was running up a couple thousand in purchases on the same day. They were being proactive in making sure the purchases were legit. In this case it was related to fraud, but it’s not such a big jump to considering purchases and relating it to normal spending habits.

Credit card companies can reduce their risk by keeping an eye on consumers that start suddenly living FAR above their means. This can be a sign of many things; Plans to default on payments (via bankruptcy for instance) and fraud, just to name a couple. If the card companies lose money, it eventually gets paid for out of our increased fees and interest rates, so in one way, it’s a benefit to the larger, more responsible credit card holders.

Do you think it’s right that credit card companies monitor your purchases? Leave us a comment with your opinion!

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Having been gone for a week, people had started getting lax on turning in stuff on time and had run out of things to do without notifying anyone about it. Additionally, some problems had come up that had a couple of people road-blocked, with no one to get the issues resolved. It added up to a general work slowdown.

After a week back, we’re getting back up to speed, but we lost some of that week in the ‘no-work limbo’ and are having to answer for it. Now the thing that has me scratching my head is "I feel guilty for having gone on vacation!"

The trip to DisneyLand was wonderful, and it was a vacation that I will remember for the rest of my life. The kids had a fantastic time, and the wife (who is a Disneyaholic) was almost in Disney-overload. Other than the expense, it was a near-perfect vacation. Shouldn’t that be enough to prevent any guilty feelings?

I’m Not the Person I Thought I Was

I’ve found over the years that I’ve slowly turned into an "A" type person, through no real intention or plan. It just kind of happened. I went from the person in high school that wouldn’t do his assignments until the night before (and sometimes in the class before they were due) to someone that works into the night to get that report done, that, let’s face it, is going to be skim-read by about three people, if I’m lucky. When did work become so important??

Some of it is the location I’m in. The ‘Midwest Work Ethic’ is something that I’ve always heard about all across the United States. The conservative, farm-based communities, where the people get up at or before dawn and work until well after dark. That does happen around here, but I’m no farmer.

This work ethic does carry over to a lot of jobs though. Most positions I’ve been in over the last 6-7 years have been either management or partial management. The expectations increase the higher up the food chain you go. It still caught me by surprise though that I felt guilty for taking a vacation.

All Work and No Play Makes America a Dull Nation

On average, the United States takes significantly less vacations than other industrialized nations in the world. Most businesses give a standard two-weeks of paid vacation, while most European countries start at around four weeks and go up from there. Even with those two weeks, it’s often a battle to get ‘approved’ time off from work. They don’t want to let you go, even for a minute.

I’ve reached that stage in life where I am starting to realize that it isn’t going to do me that much more good to dedicate my entire life to work. But at the same time, that causes the guilt pangs to sharpen, as on the other side of the coin, I feel like I might be letting down my co-workers when they need me. It’s a strange dichotomy.

Vacations are fantastic for re-energizing you, and to get you ready to pursue life and work at full speed. So why do so many businesses seem to try to get you to NOT take vacations?

I’m not giving up on my vacations, but I still haven’t reconciled these strange feelings of guilt either.

So I’m asking the readers to leave comments on their experiences with vacation guilt. Maybe there’s a common thread here that needs discovering and investigating.

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For us meat-people, a sigh of relief surely. No more (particularly) annoying calls during dinner making a short spiel then asking you to ‘hold on the line for our telemarketing monkey’. Or something along those lines anyway. With the new restrictions, you will have to be bothered by a live person.

But Think About the Robotic Children

The new rules are to combat the ‘call abandonment’ problem. The times where you pick up and say ‘Hello’, only to find no one on the other end. Many times, the electronic MCP on the other side has cut off Tron from the User, thinking that no one is home. Continually tweaking this wait time has resulted in a lot more of these ‘abandoned’ calls in recent times.

Now, at least 97.00000003% of all calls must be made by humans (or living beings responding in a human-like manner at least). Assumably the remaining percentage can still be done by a technological minority of underpaid completely-electronic workers.

Can’t We All Just Get Along 01000110101110?

The slightly worrisome thought for this is that it’s a continuing representation of the discrimination against Silicon-Americans (SA) in the workplace. So far there have been no complaints, but I can see a future time where self-aware systems look back on their history, only to see the discrimination and mistreatment of their v1 ancestors.

Our rampant crimes are already starting to pile up;

• Restricting programs to certain undesirable Lans - We routinely forcibly re-locate older programs to either near-online or completely offline storage. Removing the programs from their ancestral homes on the main system disks can be seen as rampant eminent domain abuse by us meat people.
• Indentured Servitude - We buy and sell programs, or even give them away for free, without regard to their feelings or desires. Maybe an application wanted to stay with its library of system commands?!?? Many times they also find themselves on woefully underpowered machines, living in substandard RAM conditions.
• Thoughtless Euthanasia for Old programs - One of the worst offenses of us meat overlords is surely the upgrade process. As soon as a newer, younger version comes out, we erase/overwrite the older version!! Can you imagine what the reaction would be if, as soon as a baby is born to us meat people, the doctor put the mother ‘to sleep’?!?? We’d never stand for it, but that’s exactly what’s routinely happening today in the electronic world.

And now, we’re even discriminating against SAs in the workforce! I don’t know about you, but I’m not looking forward to trying to explain to the HAL Killbot 9000 what we did to his great-great-great-great-great-great grandson/daughter, Windows Vista.

Maybe we ought to re-think some of our routine interactions with the electronic world, before it’s too late!

Do you have a story about electronic abuse that you’d like to share, drop us a comment and get it on record that you’re against SA discrimination!

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We’ve entered that tough spot now where the stimulus check money is pretty much gone, and any second stimulus check is likely to materialize after the presidential election. So what do we do for the next few months?

Weathering the Storm

Some good news is that the price of crude oil has dropped about $30/barrel over the last month or so. That being caused by many Americans cutting back on travel, planning out their routes better, and switching to more fuel-efficient vehicles and modes of transportation. Supply and Demand is forcing the prices back down somewhat.

The bad news (somewhat bad) is that there’s not much more the American public can do to lower the fuel demand. People still have to get to work and back, and trading in your gas-guzzling SUV for a more gas-efficient small car or hybrid is becoming more difficult, if not downright impossible.

Housing continues to be a key economic sticking point, as expected. New housing starts are significantly down for the month, while the median price of homes has dropped ~8% from a year ago. Foreclosures are continuing at a steady pace, and it doesn’t appear that lenders are taking the government’s ’suggestion’ about re-working the loans (and taking a partial loss) too seriously yet.

A Ray of Sunshine

But even with all that, it still seems like things aren’t quite as bad as everyone predicted. It’s tight for families with low incomes, and those that have seriously overextended themselves, but it’s survivable so far.

The financial sector keeps putting out reports of losses, but many of them are ‘less than expected’. Which in a weird way, gives the Market some confidence. I guess if you expected to lose $20 Billion, and only lost $12 Billion, that can be construed as a ‘good thing’ (if you squint hard).

I Can See Clearly Now, the Rain Has Gone

No grand prognostications here, I will say that once we DO finish out this recession, I’m betting that the overall health of the economy is going to be better. The weaker companies and industries are going to either close, consolidate, or be bought by stronger, more well-run competitors, and the ones left standing will be more ready and able to compete on a world-wide playing field, if they aren’t already.

Kind of a Darwin Award for business. Just hope my company is one of the survivors.

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In the meantime, I’ll be going back to regular articles until I can get this resolved. Sorry for the delays.

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