Mild Rants

 Just read Joe Resendiz financial whiz article about Best Credit Cards with No Balance Transfer Fee. I checked each one of them including the Edward Jones World Master Card and Alliant. NONE OF THEM had a zero Balance Transfer Fee.  Was surprised at the disinformation and the lack of due diligence and substantive research practiced by a guy who normally prides himself in being a reliable financial services writer.  Lending Tree and Value Penquin need to vet their human resources better in a time were many are experiencing hardship, depression and suicidal ideation. 

 One Main Financial Branch Manager Kristi Lueras has some new competition for super high interest rate loans with hefty origination fees. Roswell  native Heather Carrillo appears to be the head honcho of New Mexico Credit Corporation. Heather paid for a newspaper ad which did NOT disclose the interest rate which probably means it is at a usury level. Usury is a polite term for gouge.  While NMCC is not a payday loan business which sometimes have APR of 400%. Yes, you pay back in interest 4 times what you borrow!!!!! Carrillo's fees, charges, and rates must be sky high or she would have put more reasonable/fair rates in the advertisement that appeared in the RDR.   If you apply online or in person, please find out how bad your will be ripped off before signing on the dotted line. Do not use your pay stub as collateral or your car title. YOU ARE BETTER OFF GOING HUNGRY rather than burying yourself in insurmountable debt! Read the negative review put up by Ad...

Something has been bothering me for some time concerning the legal affairs of my parents.  We can start with a definition to make matters a little more clear: A probate lawyer is a state licensed attorney who "helps"  the executors and the beneficiaries of an estate to settle the affairs of the decedent including how much money and property is split up between quarreling heirs. . Back to what is pissing me off. Why do attorneys make so much money off of people dying? Real Estate agent Vivian Black has written thoughtfully about this controversial topic.  We have been stuck in Roswell,NM much longer than intended due to COVID and pressing family matters. Our time here makes us well aware of tending to the legal disposition of our aging parent's estate which almost always involves a probate attorney.  We naturally tried to acquaint ourselves with these legal fees not expecting the cost of retaining a probate lawyer to be even worse than the ridiculously high price...

Read an ad in the Hobbs NM newspaper that had a marketing slogan I had never seen. A realtor named Pattison came up  with the original shill SOMETIMES YOU JUST HAVE TO SELL !   Look at the advertisement below to see the old dilapidated haunted house the agent used to humorously get her point across. What is actually more spooky is the fact that COVID-19 is forcing some people to sell their beloved homes when they don't want to!  And the realtors, like a vulture smelling dead flesh, swoop in. I do wonder why she would say I AM NOT NUMBER ONE, YOU ARE!     Are the people in Artesia, Carlsbad, and Roswell actually stupid enough to be flattered by such deceit. Did she think she was number one until she became a real estate agent? Let me tell you what a realtor's NUMBER ONE is. It is 7% of your home's sell price, so Cheryle  would make a cool 14 thousand dollars on your $200,000 home. The fee may be 6%, but that is more than anybody deserves for selling Y...

Many American consumers are angry about the entire concept of a 3 digit credit score controlling the quality of their life. Interest rates on loans, employment checks, rates on insurance policies all depend on high or good your credit score. Enter a major player and financial terrorist Experian who now produces or calculates an INACCURATE credit score in return for their corporate profitability. They are exploiting the financial illiteracy of the typical ignorant US citizen with their latest gimmick named Experian Boost.  A credit score is base in order on  How many late credit card, mortgage or other type of loan payments you have.(No late payments is obviously the goal here) The percentage of all your credit limits that you actually use/charge. This is called credit utilization in the finance industry.  Number of new accounts(too many is considered desperate) Number of inquires(hard or soft) for new lines of credits. This means potential lenders checking up on your fin...

Newspapers are important, but they are also a source of a great deal of deception and misinformation. An example are the newspaper ads in Albuquerque, NM promoting the services of Lynette N. Turpen. Not everything is fully disclosed until you actually sit down at the table to close after your heart is set on that dream home. Lenders have a way of squeezing every last drop out of you since they know you want that house come hell or high water! Amy Lignor wrote that Janette Lucero JP Stone Community Bank mortgage loan originator served her community for 46 years. The VP is leaving town to be a grandmother in some other place. One of my cousins, with a high credit score, applied online at JP Stone for a 15 year Adjustable Rate Mortgage(ARM in financial industry lingo) He graduated in the top 10 per cent of his class at Roswell High and had been at the same job for over 2 years. The FRIENDLY community bank REJECTED his loan application. That don't sound much like faithfully servin...

Would anybody reading this have had business relations with one B. Gallagher employed by the consolidation loan entity that calls themselves Polk Partners. Mr Gallagher signed his highly esteemed name to a check made out to me valued at $40,500 When I called Polk Partners, the individual who answered for customer service did not know B. Gallagher, who anonymously chose the initial B. to conceal the name Bob, Billy, Burt, Bert, Ben, ButtHead, Bip, Barnard, Brandon, Bart, Brian, etc. So when their Funds Distribution Center Rep was of no assistance, none other than Mac Venucci, who is a columnist for Fox Chronicle, replied to an email  indicating a less than favorable review of Polk Partners . The freelance investigative reporter, residing in Barcelona, Spain, specializes in uncovering lenders practicing usury and other illicit deceptive marketing schemes.  His career in investigative journalism has taken the good looking Italian to Russia, France, Italy, and Hong Kong....

Has anybody else been going through a lot of inconvenience and hassle with Citi Accelerate Savings Account? They originally advertised a waive of the $4.50 monthly fee if account holders maintained a balance of $500. Then once we opened the account, they said that we had to do direct deposits of our paycheck in order to not pay any fees!! This was an egregious lie on their part and we spent over 4 hours on the phone and also that cheap piece of crap messaging app where you are talking to a bot and then they finally hook you up with an Asian call center who can't really help you!!! Then they want you to fill out customer satisfaction survey after no service was rendered!!!!!! It gets worse....when we signed up, the APR was 1.85%. Now it has plummeted to 1.6% AND Amex Bank High Yield Personal Savings is still holding steady at 1.7% with much better customer support and an easy and reliable money that will transfer any amount of money in less than 48 hours. We got lured in by a ...

Did anybody else open up a Citi Accelerate 1.85% Savings Account which, at the time, beat the 1.70% American Express Bank personal high yield saving account? We did and and Citi Accelerate dropped back down to 1.70% yield, so we transferred every penny back to Amex Bank! Not sure if this was just a ploy to get our business, but it did not work because Amex Bank app is much simpler to use and is never down like the Citi Bank App is occasionally. Just for the record Citi Accelerate did a high profile promotion on how their rate was higher than Amex Bank to get new customers to sign up, AND then lowered it to Amex interest rate the minute you opened Citi Accelerate account!!! I wish I had read the 2 star review by Christina Majaski before we opened Citi Accelerate account because you will get slammed by fees unless you keep a minimum balance of $500.

Just so you will know, Bayou Pawn is NOT A CHESS club in Houston,Texas. It is a PAWN SHOP! Maybe the owners know that the mere name pawn shop conjures up images of buildings with steel barred windows and exorbitant, if not illegally high, interest rates. The picture of this place, that only the most financially desperate of us will ever patronize, states this pawn shop will ALWAYS loan the most! So does this mean that if you walk in with a guitar, drum set, expensive jewelry or even  Beanie Babies and Cabbage Patch Kids, that they will give you the most cash for these items?  Maybe so, but this gyp joint will probably charge you 30% per month which equates to 360 per cent a year!!!! So if you leave them with your $1600 autographed Hank Henry Aaron baseball card, you will owe this principled South East Texas lender $480 in 30 days!!! Super Sexy Megan Elliott can tell you more about the dirty tricks these lending establishments will try on you. She actually wrot...

Before we get started here, If you are a credit card Deadbeat that is a GOOD THING!! Gosh, I would love to hear what Julia Kagan thought about this latest gimmick promoted by American Express called Plan It which apparently is copyrighted by the credit card behemoth. According to industry parlance, a Deadbeat is an informal, rather rude, term for customer who pays off his or her balance in full and on time every month, avoiding the burden to pay off interest that would have accrued on their accounts. Note Deadbeats also do not get saddled with late fees! So, I am trying to figure out what this Plan It thing is. Amex markets it by calling it a way to "Create a plan for life's big moments", but it sounds like PAYMENT SYSTEM WITHIN ANOTHER PAYMENT SYSTEM. There is no additional interest charges, but a fixed fee for each one of these Plans you Build for charges you may not be able to financially handle in a particular billing cycle. A common example, would be someone...

A gentleman by the name of Scott Sanborn sent us an official looking envelope via USA snail mail. You can view the picture of it at the bottom of this post. The CEO of Lending Club indicated we should open the letter at once since it contained important information . Scott also let us know that tampering with US mail may result in possible fine and incarceration. I guess Mr Sanborn did this to make it seem like the loan offer he enclosed was important. Scott, from the depth of his soul, wants to help all the poor folks consolidate their debt by transferring their high interest credit card debt to even higher rates with LendingClub. This was all very touching to me, so I did some research on Scottie boy. His net worth is 12 million USD and his annual salary as a lending executive is over $6,500,000. In case you haven't figured it out, how do you think Scott's 6.5 million dollar salary is paid?