Pretty desperate idea if so. I canāt really empathise with this imagined person who chooses not to spend over Ā£100 because of the rigmarole of having to insert a card and type a PIN!
They donāt even need to do that if they use their phone to pay as thatās not got a limit.
IMO They could think about promoting Apple/Google (and other wallet providers) payments and maybe easing up access to consumer credit as well as incentivising spending (rewards etc) or removing (or increasing) the cap on number of payments before having to input a pin
Roll on financial crisis #2 if they did all that, and maybe ease up on the mortgage restrictions.
Easing up access to consumer credit means looking more at history than actual income. Iāve never missed a payment (on purpose, anyways). Any time I have had a direct debit fail or something like that itās been sorted by the end of the day manually
But Iād never get a card today, because I have no income. Easing up access to credit for people with good history is not a negative thing (IMO)
Also, opening up classes on finances in colleges and moving the age for secured credit products to 16 seems like a decent idea to get people having credit for 2 years before theyāre able to handle the big people cards with actual money borrowed
You sound like youād be great with a credit card, but the problem is that an awful lot of people arenāt. Easing up on checks would be great for some people, but pretty dire for many.
The snag at the moment is that some of the checks donāt make sense for increasing numbers of people these days. For example, if you fund your retirement with a SIPP, you could put pretty much any figure down as your āincomeā because youāre in complete control of it.
I have a few credit cards, namely AmEx and an Aqua you canāt get anymore, an M&S and a Sainsburyās that Iāll probably close when I get back to England with enough time to do itā¦
But yeah, I mean you can be creative with income. Back in the day I used to use my student loans as āincomeā despite it not really being so, even though I thought it was at the timeā¦
Iām in two minds about the student loans as income. I think if Iād gotten them, Iād have been putting them down as income, just as I put the grants down as income. Even today, the loans are at least partially grants as relatively few people will pay them off and they get written off eventually.
Interestingly, I see that Virgin pay cashback on student accommodation fees.
Why wouldnāt they if they accept Visa/Mastercard?
Issuers tend to only zero rate finance related transactions.
My providers never did student accommodation or governmental fees, probably because youād still need the card for either
Chase didnāt pay cashback on it.