So - Yesterday (Friday) was the due date for a credit card payment. Long story but I do have funds to pay and I was planning to do so in person at my bank. I didn’t make it.
Should I pay cash at the bank today (Saturday morning) even though it will be recorded as received the day after due date?
Mail a check today and it will be counted paid? Isn’t there some “in the mail” clause for such payments?
Make this months payment whenever, probably by mailed check, and then make a partial payment next months when both charges are shown on the next bill?
Is there any strategy that says I paid on time? Does it really matter so long as total payment is sent by the next due date? The mailed check with the original bill is the minimum hassle option.
I’ve run into this twice. Both times I called and offered to make a payment plus an extra payment in the amount of the late charge if they would waive it due to unforeseen circumstances on my part. Worked both times with different companies.
The sooner the funds get onto your card, the better. IIRC, not just late payment but interest charges accumulate, daily.
Plus, not sure nowadays, but it used to be if you paid the full balance on time, you paid no interest - you got a free ride for up to a month. If you did not pay the balance in full, they would often back-date interest to the day of purchase… plus, if you paid partial balance, that money applied to the oldest purchase, thus allowing them to charge interest on new purchases.
About a week ago I got an email extolling the banks NEW online banking software - just sign in and try it! So I did and got a message of “click to acknowledge these new terms” at which point I aborted, planning to ask at the bank what new conditions and charges have been added for their services. Then on Thursday a USPS PO box direct debit payment bounced which should have been no problem…because of not clicking the agreement? Then I couldn’t visit them on Friday…and I now wonder if they’ve tacked on some penalty charges…
So basically I’m wondering if there is any point to mailing a check postmarked Saturday?
Do late payments trigger long-term penalties (raised interest rate, etc.) on your card? If it’s just this one payment, do what you can to get it forgiven, but then you need to be absolutely scrupulous about making at least the minimum payments on time for a year. Most issuer’s won’t cut you slack twice in any short time.
If it can or will trigger much higher costs, be more… assertive about getting them to forgive this instance.
An aside to the other posters… I don’t see the interest on one payment amount adding up to enough to worry about. It’s usually the late charges, “special processing fees” and an elevated interest rate that really bite.
IIRC, there are two: the second is something like 10 days after the nominal date. It is the second which triggers the late penalty.
If the rules haven’t changed, the biggie is 30 days for the credit report - delinquencies are classified as “Under 30 days”, “30-90” (there may be another step at 60) and “over 90”.
If you are going to be late CALL BEFORE the due date and tell them when you will pay. Then make damned certain you do it when you said you would.
I had a situation something like this, several years ago.
I called the customer service number. Their customer service seemed to be a knowledgeable live person who spoke native American English, and not reading from some stupid script. One of my options was to arrange payment by phone with him, right then, with an option for “expedited” handling (for a fee). Payment would only end up being a few days late.
He noted that I had been a card-holder with them for many years, and offered me several outs.
There would be a late fee, and fee for the “expedited” handling, and a few days of interest. He offered to waive the late fee and the “expedited” fee, which were the two larger fees (totalling something like $70 or so, IIRC). He could not waive the interest, but that was only about $7.00
He also told me that they do not report late payments to any credit bureau until they are 30 days late. IIRC, he also said that those outrageous penalty interest rates don’t come into play until a payment is 30 days late (but I’m not sure now if I’m remembering that right). That didn’t concern me too much since I almost always pay in full on time anyway.
One of those fees (I forget which) showed up again in the billing the following month. But another call to customer service quickly got that reversed.
This was a HSBC credit card. But note that HSBC cards, at the time, did not actually have anything to do with HSBC bank. It was some other bank issuing cards with the HSBC brand. More recently, HSBC has taken the HSCB-branded credit card business back in-house, so it’s not at all the same management now as it was then. YMMV.
Thanks, Senegoid and Grude, 30 days sounds like a reasonable penalty period. I’m planning to go in Monday to clear things up. I agree 1-2 days interest is no big deal.
Because on some cards, being late triggers an interest charge for your past withdrawals. So not a few days, rather 30, 60, or 90 days of interest. Plus (due to the wizardry of banking), full interest on everything for the next month as well.
Personally, I’ve never had an “interest free” credit card, so my interest rates are much lower, my penalties are non-existent, and non-payment only adds a few days interest on the credit card debt.
But some of my colleagues have been hit by large unexpected interest bills on top of the large expected penalties.
Plus, the OP mentioned paying by the next due date, a month away. That’s not a few pennies. If you’re like me and put all your non-rent expenses on a credit card, it adds up.
Exactly what happened to me recently. I have one main CC which I ‘always’ pay in full each month. The billing date is the 9th and payment is due on the 29th. I have a DD which will always pay the minimum, but I like to be in control so I transfer the balance a few days before the 29th, thus avoiding all charges.
A couple of months ago I did the transfer on my tablet instead of my home computer and made a mistake (fat fingers rule). Instead of transferring £1234.00 I transferred £123.40. A simple error which cost me dear. I saw what I had done when I checked at home but I was a day late clearing the balance. Not only did I have to pay interest on all the expenditure in the month I was late, but for the next month as well. At least there was no penalty as I had paid the minimum.
We pay off our cards 11 months out of the year, but I have a business card I use for client purchases that carries a balance more often. I would have to look up the rate etc. (being a business card, it’s a fairly crappy rate, around 11%) but my typical interest on $5,000 or so is about $15. That’s not insignificant to someone on a tight budget, but in the OP’s case it’s a modest one-time cost against much larger fees and the potential of an APR jacked through the roof. It is not, IMHO, the thing to be concerned about here.
That won’t make any difference if the postmark date is after the due date. Depending on their policy the bank may count payments received X days after the due date if it was postmarked at least Y days before the due date.
Some/Many/All of those “No charge for 6 months!” offers are actually “Deferred charge for 6 months”.
That 6 months of interest on the original charge sits there and will become payable if a payment is received late.
If you have one of those cards, either pay it down before it accululates the charge, or be real cerrtain your payment is in their hands before the due date.
Although it’s probably too late to give you advice now, in this situation I would pay in person as planned. It may still be considered late unless you get the bank to cut you some slack. Banks generally count the payment received on the date it was received; they’re not going to review your postmark (I can’t say this is true in every situation but it’s a good working assumption). I have seen mail intake centers and reviewing and recording postmarks would get expensive.
It won’t be 1 or 2 or a few days of interest. The way this works on every card I have ever had (in the last 35 years) is that if you are 1 day late, you’re late. Interest is not accrued from the due date for the number of days your payment is late–it’s for the whole billing period. It is typically accrued for the entire billing period based on your average daily balance (not calculated for individual charges).
The credit card company doesn’t care about the postmark on the envelope in which you mailed the check. All they care about is when you check arrives. If your due date is the 17th and you mail the check on the 13th but it gets there on the 18th, it is late. Period.
Having missed the due date, they are going to hit you with a late fee, which is a LOT worse than just a couple days of interest (30 dollars instead of 30 cents). But the longer you wait, the worse it gets.
If you pay a day or two late, there’s a late fee but you might be able to beg and plead and get them to reverse the fee. If you pay more than a couple days late, the begging and pleading is less likely to work. If you pay after the statement drops (typically five days after the due date) they will put a black mark in their records that you missed the payment entirely. This might affect your FICO score. If you miss two payments in a row, they definitely will notify the credit bureaus and it your score will suffer from it.
Going in to the branch and paying cash is the fastest way to make sure they actually receive the money now and record it promptly.
One more thing… whatever you do, don’t make a couple of late payments and then cancel the card, because then it will stay on your credit report for TEN YEARS that such-and-such credit card company reported that your most recent payments were late. After any late payments, if you’re tempted to cancel the cards, pay it down to zero and leave it at zero for at least a year before you cancel it entirely.
I’m not sure if this was addressed in this thread, but it is my understanding that if your card started out to be a low-interest card, and you are ever even one day late, the interest rate automatically and forever leaps up to 19% or 25% or whatever it said in the fine print that nobody reads.