I pay for almost all our household expense through my credit card and then pay it all off every month. I do this for the airline miles. This month, I forgot to schedule the payment through my bank and it won’t be paid until the 17th when the due date is the 15th. I have a stellar credit rating, will this one off incident have an impact?
Read the fine print.
They can raise your interest rate, or do other obnoxious things.
Make the payment, if there’s any late fees, call and ask if they’ll waive them, which they almost certainly will since it sounds like this is a very rare thing. Similarly, if they ding your credit report, which I don’t think they will since it’s only 2 days, see if they’ll fix that as well.
Generally, the payment has to be late 30 days to make an impact on your credit score. You should be fine on that count. However if you ever do have a one month late charge against you (auto-payment fails and you don’t notice for example) that shit can stick around for up to 7 years dragging down your credit score, even if eventually just by a little.
This happened to me a few years ago. I put my bills in chronological order that the need to be paid and on Sunday night I sit down and pay, either by phone or mail. Now some are required automatic withdrawal (or pay a fee) that I am not a fan of.
One of the credit card bills slipped down and I didn’t discover it until it was 3 days late. Called and explained about how I never missed a payment (I pay the full amount) in the 8 years that I had the card and asked about a grace period. Denied! So I told the customer service representative that I do have other credit cards in my wallet and I could easily make one of them my preferred card to use instead of theirs and potentially close my account with them. I was then passed onto a manager and she did me a one time “favor” of not assessing the late fee and interest. She made such a big production out of it you would have thought she preformed CPR and saved my life.
Doesn’t hurt to call their customer service and see if they would waive any fees because of the late payment. If you are a good long term customer with no other issues I would thing they would be accommodating.
Make the payment on the credit card website. It will get credited immediately. I’ve been in the exact situation and it worked. I’ve made the payment on the due date without a problem.
Pay immediately and call them.
There should be ZERO impact to your credit rating.
They might charge you a late payment fee, if you’ve been with them for many years they will likely waive it if you ask.
They will almost certainly charge you interest on all purchases from the date of the purchase, and will likely NOT waive that. Depending on the interest rate you can end up with a surprising amount of interest (say $50 on $2000 in purchases for an average of 30 days)
This is all from my experience with my usually very financially responsible nieces and nephews, who call Uncle Mouse for issues like this. They are always terrified that catastrophe will follow.
Sorry if this is bleeding into IMHO territory.
Note that CC companies make little or no money from clients who pay up on the due date.
The fine print usually says that:
If you pay the bill when it is due, there is no interest on the charges.
Whatever you don’t pay on the bill they will assess interest on the charges for unpaid items from the date of purchase.
To ensure the largest amount of interest, they will apply any partial payment to most recent purchases first, meaning interest calculated back to the oldest charges still outstanding.
This is why they love people who are late or only pay the minimum amount. With $1,000 of charges at 29%/year is $290, or $24 a month. Technically if you are a day late, they can charge you all the interest they can calculate going back up to the oldest purchase, almost 2 months. (Not sure if there’s a non-payment penalty too).
So if my statement cut-off is the 10th and I buy something July 11th, I get a statement after August 10th with that item on it, and payment due Aug. 30th. If I miss that payment and pay Aug 31st, then they can assess interest for that purchase’s amount for July 11th to Aug 31st, almost 2 months…
In Canada, where I pay online through my bank, the consumer protection rule is the bill is deemed paid the day I make the payment from my bank account, no matter how long it takes for the payment to be accepted and processed through to the company who issued the bill. (Can be an overnight or two to fully process some items…) So I can make the payment online on the 30th and the bill is deemed paid that day, no penalties can apply, even if they don’t get it from the bank until the next morning etc. Presumably many companies allow a buffer of a day or two to compensate for this issue.
As someone who works for a retailer, they make a MINIMUM of 1.00% in transaction fees on everything you charge. If it’s at a small retailer (not a billion dollar chain) they might be charged 3%, but I don’t know how much goes to the issuer vs the processor, but 1% is a very nice return on 25 days average days outstanding for a debtor with very low default risk.
I make late payments maybe six times a year. I just forget sometimes. My credit score is still around 800. As long as it’s not more than 30 days late, I haven’t had an issue.
Yes, the people who pay every month on time are usually a good source of merchant fees and very little management overhead, since they aren’t in the pool of problem cardholders. Since Covid I’ve done almost no cash transactions, everything goes on my credit card, resulting in over $2,000 a month in expenses. So the credit card company is making about $40 a month off of me just by letting the computer chug away.
The few payments that need my attention, I usually do somewhere between the 27th and 30th when they all come due. Most minor payments (cell, Netflix, etc.) are automatic off my credit card.
I always pay my credit card bill in full within 24 hours of it appearing in my inbox (sometimes within minutes, if I happen to be at the computer when it is delivered). But just one time I didn’t see it (they changed the sending date, the f**kers, and I wasn’t looking for it) and I was a day late in paying. To their credit (hah) they did send a notice as soon as the deadline elapsed and I hadn’t paid, so I didn’t accumulate lots of fees. There was a $27 charge for the late payment, which I didn’t know until this thread I probably could have contested, with my perfect history.
Anyway, there was no change to my credit score, which always hovers in the mid-800s so who cares if it drops by a few points anyway. BUT I started getting spammed with tons of “EZ loans now!” and “consolidate your debt with WeCredit!” and all sorts of scummy nonsense. I religiously unsubscribed from all of it and am no longer receiving any. It was gross, though.
Long ago we had an account (phone? cable TV?) where we’d paid on time for years, never being late. We were almost late once and got a blood-curdling warning from the company one day before the payment would’ve been late.
You’re only as valuable as your last payment to some of these people.
To the OP, and out of curiosity:
You pay off your CC bill in full each month, but you manually schedule the payment through your bank (I assume some sort of billpay method?). I do the same thing, except I have my payment scheduled on the due date through my CC site, and each month it’s paid on time. I know it’s an ACH payment originating from the credit card site to my bank (rather than the opposite way, like you do), but it’s automatic and I never have to worry about it.
Is there a reason why you don’t use the method I use?
One thing that you may be able to do is make a payment by phone.
Call the customer service number on the back of your credit card and walk through the telephone tree (some have voice-response systems, and “make a payment” is usually the key phrase to say). You’ll have to give your checking account info (routing number & account number) but they will typically credit your account same-day, even on weekends.
I’ve gotten into the habit of making payments this way regularly - it’s about as easy as writing a check.
Right? This ‘paying bills’ thing seems very quaint? Is it an American thing specifically?
In Britain, you authorise your regular suppliers to take as much money from your bank account as they want, whenever they want. In this context, your credit card bill is just another regular supplier payment. We call it ‘direct debit’, or DD. If they don’t charge you - their problem. If they overcharge you - their problem. Any problems at all - their problem: banks are very, very cross with any supplier who messes up, and there is no risk to the consumer, since you can retrospectively cancel any payment under a DD for any reason or no reason at all. Banks, consumers, and competent companies love this system. Because it is so fantastically efficient for everyone involved.
You don’t have that?
Automatic payments are an option, for my credit card, my cable bill and my cell phone bill. But I have this perhaps irrational fear of one of the companies sucking all of the money out of my account. So instead I pay the bills immediately upon receiving the email notification.
Oh, we certainly have that. That’s how I pay my CC, electric, and cell phone bills. I pay my cable and gas bills via charge to my credit card, but Verizon and the electric company charge a fee to pay by credit card.
Well, because I put all my purchases for the month on my card it can be a very large amount and before I make the payment, I have to move the money from an interest account to my checking. All of my utilities, cable, etc., automatically bill my credit card. I have almost 1m frequent flyer miles from the credit card that I like to keep topped up. Then I pay it all off every month.
If it was set up automatically, I could end up paying thousands of dollars from an account with $500 in it.
This is literally the first time I ever forgot.