I’ll admit, I was lured in by you. My mailbox received lots of mail from you and your pre-approvals. Many, many, pre-approvals.
Six months of 0% APR? Why yes, that does sound delightful!
A $39 annual fee? Well, my other cards don’t have any fees, but $39 ain’t that much.
A high credit limit? OK, I give, I don’t even use a credit card that often, but I’m going on a couple trips ahead and it’s good to have another card for emergency’s sake.
So, I apply online, get immediate approval and love showered on me and a couple days later, I get the card with Van Gogh on it. (It was that or kittens or flags or kittens waving flags). I stick it in my wallet and don’t give it a second thought for a while.
Fast forward a couple weeks to today. I get my monthly credit bureau report and my scores have dropped. Quite significantly too. Experian, for one has dropped almost 40 points. Whaaaat? According to the report, I’ve got 99.8% of credit available on my cards. The reason, it turns out, is that on one of my cards the balance to limit ratio is too high. That card? Capital One. It’s showing its annual fee of $39 on my report and that’s it. It’s also not showing a limit. This is a nice little ding that knocked the score down.
Are they reporting the high limit in lieu of the maximum credit limit? That is, the most you’ve ever had charged up on that card at one time?
I’ve heard that in these situations you can charge up a whole lot one month, then pay it all off immediately. The “high limit” number is what the credit bureaus will calculate on in the absence of a reported “credit limit”.
Whereas all of the other cards have the high balance, they also have the limit which is what the report is figuring the fico score off of. My other two cards (One with a $6.00 balance and the other with $150.00) are well below their limits. But since the score is based on individual instead of collective available credit limits, I’m getting dinged by Crapital One’s scheme.
I applied for and recieved a Capital One card a couple of years ago. The intention was to have a separate card for my business expenses to make tax time a bit easier. I put my office as my billing address. Now this is an office that I share with about twenty other people and the mail comes to the front desk and is distributed from there. The amount of junk mail I started to recieve was absolutely astonishing.
I would get at least one piece of junk mail a day trying to get me to sign up for all sorts of dubious credit arrangements. I figured it would slow down, but for a year I recieved something every day. It became an embarassment as most of it was offers to repair people’s credit. My credit is good, but I am sure I looked like a chronic deadbeat. I was thrilled to close that acccount and be rid of them.
I love my CitiBank card. No annual fee. Low percentage rate. Cashback bonus rewards.
CapitolOne is a great big [del]poo[/del] shit flinging monkey in my book. Their many times weekly “offers” don’t even make it from the mailbox to inside the house. A trash can beside the garage is a good thing.
Not that I like the Capital One maneuver, but shouldn’t some ire be reserved for a credit scoring model that lowers your score more than one full point for each dollar of this reported balance?
Just a friendly suggestion- those offer mailings should be shredded, not just tossed into an outside trashcan. They are identity theft waiting to happen.
But- just because FICO or whoever the hell it is has no common sense and sues a silly-assed and meaningless system to assign you a “score”- why is this Capital One’s fault?
The fault really lies in the FICO point system, which seems to have no* direct* basis is reality.
This was my thought as well. We have 3 corporations that pretty much control the quality of your life when it comes to the big things. Housing, car, employment. And if they get something wrong? Now you’re fucked.
You have to figure out which hoops to jump through to see what they have on you. (Free once a year, IF you know where to go) If something is wrong and really drags you down through no fault of your own? Fuck you. Spend the next year trying to fix it. Meanwhile, we’ll continue to trash your financial standing until we get around to fixing it. Recompense for our screw-up? Fuck you. Make enough noise and we’ll, ahem, make a few more mistakes.
I don’t know what the book’s plot device was, but based on the end goal protrayed in the movie, I’d blow Tyler Durden. I’d even swallow.
*Capital One says the information is proprietary but if their good customers have artificially lower scores, it may keep them from being cherry-picked by other credit card companies. *
I just got one of these with a $3K limit. I did this because I wanted to have an alternative to my MBNA card which has a $2.5K limit. I am currently carrying no balance on either of the cards (well, I did charge up $900+ on the CapOne card, but after reading all this crap I paid it off from my checking account.)
I just checked my FICO score and, sure enough, in the last two months since getting my CapOne card, it’s gone down from 685 to 666. The whole point for me getting the CapOne card was to increase my available credit and hopefully inch my credit score back up to the 700s, where it belongs.
What’s my best option now? I suppose there’s no way I, as a consumer, can directly report my credit limit to the credit agencies, I suppose? And with a 666 score and recent ping for the CapOne credit check, I don’t think CitiBank or BankOne will be lining up to do business with me, will they?
Is it wise for me to close this account immediately? I’d like to have an extra $3K in case of emergencies, but not if my FICO is being completely screwed.
:mad: Fuckers! That’s why I’m getting declined for other cards! Oh, we are so broken up Capital One!