I got a good laugh about this (BofA wants to do the same thing. Basically, people like me (who pay off their CC balance in full-and hence, pay no interest)-are considerd deadbeats! Because they claim that they “lose” money on us, we are going to be charged a monthly fee to use the card!
Well, I have news for them-the minute they try this, I cancel the card.
Do we need ANY more proof that the congress is owned by the banks?
We need reform, right away!
I don’t even have a CC, for this very reason. Every time I hear Dopers bitching about their credit cards, I smile.
You got the relationship exactly bass ackwards.
You realize they are probably trying to get you to cancel the card.
In that case, I’ll keep it, just to fuck with them!
What the hell does this have to do with Congress???
Some credit card companies discussed doing something like this a few years ago, IIRC. I don’t think it actually happened. Does anybody else remember this, or did I imagine it?
Via TARP, they own Citibank and BofA, among others.
How about we first try letting Adam Smith’s invisible hand smack the shit out of them when they actually introduce this fee?
If everybody paid their balance in full every month, there would either be no credit cards, or there would be a monthly charge to have one. I’m not a big fan of these things or anything but the concept of a business wishing to make a profit is not by itself immoral.
I’m currently very pissed at Citibank, too. For the last two or three years, I had a MC that had a SmarTrip built in – that’s an RFID smart card that is used on DC subways and buses.
So, Citibank cancels the program this summer. Eh, whatever, I guess it wasn’t a success. They say I have to choose a new credit card. Fine. Well, I had just gone on a very nice vacation and charged the hotel on the card, expecting to pay it off by November or December this year.
First, they wouldn’t allow me to transfer the balance to the new card without a $75 fee (and even then they didn’t offer a low APR). Now, I just realized that they jacked up the rate on the “canceled” card from about 13% to 26%. Bastards.
But credit cards make a profit off of the fees they charge to merchants.
Eh. They get a small piece of every transaction made with the credit card, so it’s not like they’re not making any money from the card. Just not enough to pay the multi-million dollar bonuses to the execs.
One of the UK credit card companies (Egg) had a “cull” a while back to cancel the cards of customers who weren’t paying their CC bills. Turns out they also culled everyone who paid off their balances in full every month. It did not win them any friends.
Yeah, there’s no freaking way that a cc company is losing money on cards with no balance. 1% on every last transaction or so, depending on the details of the merchant agreement. So yeah, they’re loaning the user the money for about 2 weeks on average with the grace period, but 1% covers that plus a lot more unless we’re moving back to early 80’s interest rates. I’ll believe that the cc company makes a lot lower margin on paid up cards, but not that they’re losing money on them.
Fair enough then, this changes my view considerably.
Did they actually call these customers “Deadbeats”? I think that would bother me more than the profit grab. Like Bup says, if they introduce a new fee you oppose, you simply leave and let Adam Smith’s Invisible Dopeslap knock some sense into them. But if they slandered good people who are the exact opposite of deadbeats, that’s just a dick move.
Since my credit card issuer (First National Bank of Omaha) facilitated automatic payment of my balance, meaning that it would be impossible for me to incur finance charges even if I wanted to, I have to assume they’re satisfied with having me as a non-fee-paying, non-interest-paying card holder.
You might wish to find such a company before you run whining to Congress demanding that they pass a law (enforced at taxpayer expense) forcing every bank to serve every customer, whether they want to or not.
Glad for an opportunity to have a little moan about this. I’ve just discovered my CC company (CIBC) is charging me interest on a zero balance.
I got my statement yesterday for October and noticed a $30.00 interest charge and double checked to confirm that I had paid September’s balance before the due date, which I had. So I got out my bi-focals and read the fine print. Turns out that because I had paid August’s bill a few days late (and paid the interest in September) I was being charged interest on my Sept/Oct purchases, for the sole reason that I am no longer a Quebec resident. (where the card was issued)
HUH? First of all, what kind of fucked up logic is there in charging interest at all on last month’s paid-on-time purchases because I did not pay the previous month’s on time? And second, what does where I live have to do with anything?
I’m sure now someone will come along and give a perfectly reasonable explanation but for now I remain ???
Is this something that they are actually doing? Because I didn’t see a link in the OP to anything that would indicate this is an actual plan.
I’d be a little irritated at this, because I use credit cards as a convenient purchasing mechanism that is isolated from my actual money in case of fraud. I’m not sure I’d accept an annual fee (and I certainly wouldn’t accept no grace period), so I’d have to make another plan.
I really did think that I was still profitable to them because of the merchant fees. If that is true it is hard to imagine that the new fees would make up for the loss of customers caused by the new fees. There is a big psychological difference between free use and being directly billed for use, and the sort of person that pays their bill off in full is especially sensitive to that.