You With An Offer To Clear Past Due Bill New Rule Means Less Money
Credit card default rates are at 10% the highest ever. Banks who issue credit cards may have to greatly increase the amount of cash reserves to cover these debts thanks to a proposed accounting standard change. More money for reserves means less money for lending.
What does this mean to the average consumer?
First of all, if you are behind on your credit card payments and you can’t see a way to catch up, now is an excellent time to call your card company and negotiate a cash settlement. It’s probably a good idea to use a non-profit credit counseling service to assist you in coming up with a proposal that is reasonable and a plan for how to pay it.
Why are the banks eager to close out bad credit card accounts? It has been the practice of most banks to bundle credit card loans and sell them as investment deals. These deals are considered “off the books” and as such do not have to be shown on the bank’s balance sheet. In other words they have no impact on the bank’s earnings even if the loans go bad. The new accounting rule will change that and eliminate “off the books” deals.
Bank regulations require that a cash reserve be kept to cover bad debt on loans. However, since the off the books investment packages are not included on the bank’s balance sheet, there is no requirement to keep a cash reserve for them.
Bringing these loans back on the books is going to have a significant impact on the amount of cash a bank needs to cover the reserve. To give you an idea of the magnitude of this rule change, American Express says it will have to add $28 billion in loan liabilities while Citigroup says it will have to add over $98 billion! Didn’t we just bail these guys out?
Adding those kinds of numbers to their outstanding loans will mean that the cash reserves will have to be increased by billions of dollars. Consequently, banks are open to consumers negotiating a lump sum settlement. If a bank can get $700 on a $1000 balance, that’s $700 that they don’t have to hold a reserve on and that makes them motivated. Motivated to the point that some banks are actually calling the card holder first and they are calling themselves rather than hiring collection agencies.
There really is no downside for the consumer. By being late on the payments, the consumer’s credit rating is already damaged. If the cash can be put together the consumer can get a significant discount on their debt. However, the time to act is now. Late fees and a default interest rate of 30% are still being applied so why wait.