I submit as evidence of big bank bullshit, the matter of a past-due balance of $41 that was carried for 5 calendar days beyond the “due date” (which is actually a date that already includes a 25 day grace period, but that is not apparent when reading the statement wherein it is listed as “due date”) that Chase saw fit to use as justification to jack up interest rates on our considerable line of credit.
Even if the rate increase is small (as the supervisor I just spoke to tried to diffuse my temper with) it is still bullshit and Chase just rate-hiked their way out of any future interest they might possibly have gleaned from us.
Yet another cautionary tale for anyone who may not have the opportunity to just close their accounts and find a better lender…Don’t employ any risky behavior like making ballpark estimates of what your minimum payment might be based on past payment amounts while in the middle of the chaos of moving. You might underestimate by $41 and give the blood-sucking puss waffles that hair’s-breadth of an excuse they’re looking for to squeeze more money out of you before the consumer-protection controls kick in.
I swear to god, I don’t have a whole lot of sympathy. The terms of your account are spelled out for you. You are responsible for making your minimum payment and knowing what it is. Yeah, is the jacking of the rate a shit thing to do? Sure, but this is a credit card company you’re dealing with. They’re all just this side of the mob. You think they’re made of fluffy bunnies? They’re kind of a known entity.
Yeah, it’s been pretty widely publicized that banks have been going nuclear on their customers for the last year or so. So it’s crappy, yes, but you gotta be vigilant about your money in this day and age.
Look, it’s very simple. These guys said to you, “Shall we play a game, Professor Falken?” You make your payments on time, every time, and you get to keep this rate. They offered you this deal because, in their experience, x% of people fuck it up.
You took the deal because (presumably) you were convinced you wouldn’t fuck it up. Other people take the deal because they’re drooling morons who can’t read their card agreements.
Now you fucked it up. But rather than say, “Yeah, OK, that’s one on me, they got me,” you seem intent on blaming them for your woes. I assume that if we ever played Monopoly you’d be pissed at my demanding the rent after you landed on my Boardwalk with a hotel, because it wasn’t your fault, the dice hit the stack of Chance cards, and it’s only two spaces on the entire board that have such high rates and it’s not fair!
Although they do rig the game - you don’t have to fuck up because they do it often enough. I’ve had cases where we can trace the check to show it got cashed by the due date, but they’ve withheld crediting the payment and charged me interest and jacked up the rates. I really don’t want to take time from my life to prove they have the ace up their sleeve (I have, but it is a rather time consuming process).
I don’t carry a balance at all on credit cards anymore…and any card that is used gets paid an estimated minimum amount bimonthly so that their ‘errors’ don’t become my problem. Or, my own fuck ups don’t become my problem.
(Currently, my AmEx card is fucking up in my favor to the tune of $1500. I paid the wrong AmEx card, and the nice lady on the phone transferred the payments over from the business card to the personal card. Except I got the credit on my personal card, and they didn’t debit my business card. The $1500 credit has been there nine months now (I’m not traveling for work right now).
Well before everyone jumps to Chase’s defense, let me air my grievances with them. My wife and I had multiple accounts with WaMu and since Chase took over:
They want to charge us $9.50 a month to download transactions with Quicken on 2 out of 6 of our accounts (the others are still free for some reason).
They started charging us for every external balance transfer.
They will not turn off overdraft protection on any account type for any transaction type for any reason.
They “simplified” transaction descriptions so some are almost unidentifiable.
These are just the issues we have had with them in the last year. None of it is break the budget, life is impossible type stuff. Just inconvenient and annoying.
And BTW, on the going past the due date thing, banks have for a while been shifting the due date around from month to month. My mother got in way over her head when she moved a few years ago because she paid on the date for the last statement she got which was two days past the current due date. They more than doubled her rate and put her past her credit limit with fees (she had a high balance due to moving expenses). It took her almost two years to get out from under that.
Banks also make it a habit of holding transactions for a few days (they show up online as pending). They can’t hold deposits and process debits any more, but what they can do is process the debits in an order that will give them the most fees. Recent example from my mom (again): Someone held one of here checks a little to long (about a month) and she forgot about it. She has $140 in checking an $146 in savings. She current has no access to the Internet, so I have bee checking up for her. On Tuesday, she had about $75 worth of pending charges, so I transferred about some money around to keep here balance above $200. On Wednesday, I check again and the $236 check was received and somehow processed before all the other two pending transactions, causing all three of them to be overdrafts. According to the date, the check was actually processed before I checked her account. That cost her $75 in “courtesy” fees.
While that was pretty harsh, there are ways to avoid this kind of thing with most cards. My normal policy is to pay my card weekly so I avoid interest. If I do decide to carry a balance for a while, I set up an automatic payment for the minimum and then pay whatever extra manually. That way, I never forget to pay or pay late, no matter how hectic life gets.
I really don’t understand this mentality. We see it in every thread- “It’s your own fault, suck it up.”
Does this, somehow, make it better? Do you think the complainer will, someday in the future, think back on what **Bricker **once told them, and do something completely different?
Never mind the fact that you’re defending the side which holds all of the cards. They get to choose their customers, they get to write the contracts, and they get to change the contracts whenever they feel like it. Oh, and they get to have more input on the laws than their customers do, as well. Why do they need defending?
It depends. Did you make them pay to play the game with you… and then change the rules halfway through the game? Sure, they could’ve stopped playing the game… but did you offer them a refund if they chose to do so?
Don’t get me wrong. I think credit cards are, in general, evil and a trap. I have exactly one credit card, and I pay it off every month. My debt is almost non-existent; basically, my car (which is almost paid off) and my wife’s student loans (which I’m starting to think we’ll never see the end of). However, I’m still able to look at what the credit card companies and see that they’re doing their damnedest to take advantage of their customers, many of whom are kind of over a barrel. Telling those customers “You’re stupid, and it sucks to be you” doesn’t solve anything, and actually just empowers the credit companies to go even further in their attempts to make us pay for their past mistakes.
Are you (legally) in the right to say so? Sure.
It is right to say so? No. It’s kind of a jerkish thing to do.
As someone who paid her credit card late a couple of months ago because I forgot to look at the due date (and assumed it was something it wasn’t), and had only this one late payment in decades, I’ll say for the OP that shit happens. If my rates had gotten jacked up because of my own negligence, I’d be mad alright, but mad at myself for such a bone-head move.
I also remember trying to keep track of all the bills and receipts and payments and appointments when we changed houses last summer - my god, what a mess. At the end of it, I kept feeling like I had missed something because there is just SO MUCH going on, all at the same time. Sorry, OP - you dropped one of the balls. I hope the repercussions aren’t too high.
It’s true that lenders can’t do anything to you that you haven’t agreed to on paper.
But, what the OP shows, and many other people have experienced, is that many lenders are unwilling to operate in a sort of neighborly, friendly, compassionate manner that folks might want.
Is the bank right to raise their rates on the OP? Well, sure, it’s in the contract. However, things like having a ‘grace period’ that expires on the due date, raising interest rates on a line of credit for one late payment, and other such actions just remind one that the lenders could give two shits about you, and that their friendly-seeming advertising about how they’re there for you are all bald-faced lies. And it sucks to be lied to, and that’s totally worth a pitting.