By Colleen Rothe

Anything labeled “Bill of Rights” should be a good thing, right?

Wrong.

The Credit Card Bill of Rights Legislation that just passed through Congress is supposed to protect consumers, and likely it will. But the ramifications mean that credit will be harder to come by, and even the credit you already hold may be deemed too risky. This week, you may find yourself like many Americans, opening letters from your credit card companies that say your card has been cancelled.

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By Colleen Rothe

This past holiday weekend my husband fixed his Google phone, a kid’s dirt bike, a dishwasher, a CD player, and the defrost on one of our vehicles.

We did a quick add up – just rough estimates – and his handy skills likely saved us about $1,540. No small potatoes. And, no, you may not borrow him. Although, I might let you hire him…

But you can borrow his father’s philosophy, which was dutifully passed along to him and now is slowly moving to my own children.

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By Colleen Rothe

The headlines this weekend – if you were so inclined to pay attention to such business headlines versus the scarier ones of Korea launching nuke testing – were mooing about plunging milk prices.

Yes, as a mom with three growing kids still at home, a gallon of milk is used up in our household pretty quick. So what it costs, where to get it cheap and fresh, is a must for our family.

Luckily in Western Washington, dairy farmers aren’t too hard to come by. So prices, at an all-time high of nearly $5 a gallon (on sale, mind you) last summer, have evened off and I can now normally get a steroid-free variety of milk for about $2 a gallon.

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By Gene Ayres, Your Consumer Curmudgeon

Most of you have by now received, or will soon receive your own equivalent to the Billion Dollar Big Bank Bailout, in the form of an unasked for check or automatic deposit in the amount of a whopping $250, if you happen to be a taxpayer (CEOs and Senators thus presumably exempted).

Here’s what happened to my $250 bonus. I hadn’t even gotten it yet when (in fact, perhaps, because I hadn’t even gotten it yet) my bank WaMu/Chase reached out and grabbed $34 off the top. That was for an overdraft, because my auto-billpay automatically deducts my monthly bill payments prior to sending out the check in the snail mail. Which means they get to spend my money interest free for a week or so. This has cost me on a regular basis, because the bill payment checks go out, more often than not, before my automatic deposits and other checks come in. And this week my primary income deposits were all from five to ten days late (blame the economy, I guess, or maybe Tim Geithner). Amazing how that works.

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By Gene Ayres, Your Consumer Curmudgeon

Lately, I’ve been dealing with yet another corporate giant in an effort to break through yet another stone wall of the sort that has been constructed in the last few decades to protect corporations, like the mighty fiefdoms they’ve become (if not downright empires). Before getting to the subject at hand, here’s a little bit of history. Let’s start with the following quote:

"Corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed."

Does this sound like Al Gore, perhaps? Or maybe Ralph Nader?

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Here at Consupo, we often hear from people who have experienced, well, less than satisfactory customer service, and who are not always sure how to go about sharing that experience. The simplest way is to post a case on Consupo.com, and that is usually where we refer them. But sometimes, we get stories emailed to us that just have to be shared. The following is by Piney Kahn about IndyMac Federal Bank.

My mortgage company is IndyMac and I received a letter from them stating they had no evidence of my home having hazard insurance. I must provide this info immediately, or they would "assign" me with an insurer (this was around February of 2008). Of course, there was no way I could have gotten a mortgage in the first place without having insurance, so this was pretty baffling. I had my insurance company immediately fax the info, but the letters kept coming from IndyMac. The paperwork had been faxed and mailed multiple times by my insurance company and myself. No matter what I did, the letters kept coming and every time I called I was subjected to the same long, irritating message (lecturing me that I needed to provide proof of insurance) and voicemail loops, there was no way around it and no direct extensions. Every person I talked to would also lecture me about what I had to provide. My insurance people had even gotten a hold of specific people and faxed it to their individual machines. I kept asking if there was a way I could scan it in and e-mail it, but IndyMac does not have e-mail that works outside of the company (only internally).

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By Gene Ayres, Your Consumer Curmudgeon

Recently I tried to buy airline tickets for my wife and daughter for a return visit to China. It seems there are a lot of bargains available in the way of airfares. Unfortunately, none of them seem to be for travel to China. Maybe it’s the airlines’ way (or somebody’s way) of exacting some degree of payback on China and/or its citizens, and/or anybody who wants to go there, for all their success lately.

After extensive perusal of the internet, I did find some good deals. A website called Cheapflights.com had lots of reasonable fares from Seattle to Beijing. If you clicked on an attractive fare of $672 round trip (RT), you were then dispatched to another site called Cheapair.com. In the blink of an eye, $672 was suddenly $1318. Heckuva tax. At least for the days I wanted. Theoretically, you could enter a different date and day of the week for each leg of your travel and get a completely different quote. Which, I suppose, is why we have travel agents.

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By Colleen Rothe

All those Valentine’s Day or springtime engagement couples are now facing the mammoth task of planning a wedding.

But how do you plan a wedding in a downtrend economy?

According to a recent Bloomberg article, many to-be-weds are now planning to or have already cut back their spending more than a quarter. The typical $60 billion-a-year wedding industry is being hit just as hard as the rest of the business world. All right, maybe not as hard as the auto industry, but analysts agree that 75 percent of couples have downsized their nuptial events.

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By Gene Ayres, Your Consumer Curmudgeon

I recently tried to sell my car. Not easy to do, and I now begin to sympathize, at least a little, with the car dealers. I put an ad in our last remaining, still struggling newspaper, The Seattle Times, in their online Northwest Autos section. Next day, I got a response. It went downhill from there.

Whether it was just dumb luck (bad luck, in my case) or not, I have a weakness for art and artistic people and endeavors of all stripes. So when a man purporting to be the owner of an art gallery in London, whose email name included the gallery and whose email included a link to said gallery’s impressive website (it is, in fact a real gallery as well as a museum, in London) I was impressed. Just like I was supposed to be.

Dulwich Picture Gallery. Lemar Dulwich at your service, if you please.

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