A little something from your banker.

I’m delighted to know that there’s a new kind of credit card out there — one that lets you set all sorts of conditions and limits for yourself. As reported in “Your Card Has Been Declined, Just As You Want” by Ron Lieber in The New York Times, the idea is to give you some power for a change.

You just know the first time some bright young banker proposed this in a meeting she was met with an appalled silence. Well, times change and even Big Banks do nice little things for customers every couple of years. This is one.

Reading this I was reminded of calling up a bankcard company some years ago and asking them to lower my credit limit. They had no mechanism, no paper form, no policy. But because it was a credit union and customer-service people were empowered to solve problems, the nice person on the phone figured out a way. It was a key part of getting myself out of some pretty deep debt. (I wrote about it in 1997, here, for the Seattle Times in “Debt Lite: Shedding ugly pounds of plastic.”)

I stopped myself from reading to the end of the NYT story or looking into it more deeply because I didn’t want to get to the part where the inevitable “service charges” get described.

The banking world is like one big fishing trip. We small customers are the fish and yes, now and then they do practice catch-and-release. They’re waiting for us to get big enough to make a decent meal. But, hey, enjoy the swim in the meantime.