[USpol sorta][also parental shittiness] you know sometimes i think about the credit card i got when i was 18, because at that time, credit card companies started bombarding you with credit offers as soon as your birthday passed

(i'm pretty sure that's illegal now)

and i think about when i realized i was in over my head with it, not that many months into having it, and tried to close the account

i think about the guy who explained that my account was delinquent and already closed, and that there was no way for me to stop fees and interest from continuing to pile up other than paying it (which i couldn't do)

and i think about the tone of his voice as he realized that no one had ever explained this to me

and the tone as he tried to arrange for me to pay even just $11 on it and i said i would have to ask my parents

(edited in a CW for parental shittiness)

he sounded confident enough that they would help me that i expect a lot of teenagers' parents just paid the whole balance for them and credit card companies probably made quite a bit of profit on teenagers who'd never had credit explained to them getting in over their heads and getting bailed out

which sure does give me some complex feelings about the fact that my mom regularly bragged about her six figure bak account and yet that eventual $2500 default balance (the credit limit on the card was $800, the rest of that is fees and interest) remained on my history until i was 26 lmao

(not that she was obligated to bail me out, but she didn't even give me that $11 for a good faith payment)

but idk i think about the guy on the phone who was clearly used to teenagers who had been preyed upon by the bank (because letting someone sign up for a card by filling out a form is predatory!) and how i was clearly not the first person he'd had to explain this to

it was clear from his tone that he felt bad about this, but idk, i don't necessarily think he SHOULD feel bad, he didn't do the predation, but i do kinda wonder what his deeper thoughts were about it

anyway if someone has never had a credit card before it should be illegal to let them open one without sitting down with an employee of the bank who makes sure they 100% understand how credit works and what they will and won't be able to do. someone who already has a good credit score can fill out the form, that's fine, you know they understand

idk if this is illegal in the US now but i hope it is

when I visited my college for the first time back in 2004, CitiBank had me fill out some paperwork that they said was just to send me INFORMATION about a credit card and then they'd give me a shirt. I just wanted the free t-shirt. A few weeks later I got TWO credit cards in the mail.

I actually kept one of them and canceled the other. It was a big mistake. Took me forever to get out of the debt it put me in. Fucking crazy.

oh my god

yeah that doesn't surprise me, i had an amazon account so i had an offer for $50 off my order if i applied for an amazon rewards credit card every time i made an order

i think I was included in some kind of settlement a while later? but it was only like... for a few hundred bucks. I don't even remember.

ugh yeah i don't think i ever got anything like that

i also applied and got a victoria's secret store credit card (are store credit cards even really a thing anymore?) to buy a $45 bottle of perfume, and that eventually ballooned to $300

store credit cards are still a thing yes

because as i recall it there wasn't so much an application process for a store card as a signup process, they just automatically approved you? even though it was very much a credit card with the same rules and obligations and credit reporting

so that seems shortsighted

I had a JCpenny card that I thought I paid off. But apparently I had like $1 still on it and they charged me something absurd for not paying it. I was so mad

i think it might have actually hit like $800 before falling off my credit history

oh my god

it's way too easy to get credit cards period. they just give you a super shitty interest rate if you have bad credit... which only means you'll have an even harder time paying it off. it's all garbage.

yeah, it's sharecropper math, and like you can't...imagine that they make money this way? but i guess enough people just feed them enough pennies that over time it builds up