Quote:
Originally Posted by Cinisajoy
It showed on the new statement.
That is why I am upset.
We shall see on Friday what they say.
If they still insist, we will pay the late fee.
Already planning on cancelling the card. Just cancelling 10 months earlier than we had planned.
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I've been watching the credit cards with grim amusement.
At the bank I once worked for in a consumer credit operation, we all got a good case of schadenfreude. The bank's credit card operations, in a different area of the bank in a different geographic location, had a bright idea for raising revenues and profits. They would
lower the credit scores they required to get a card, and increase their market share.
It worked for a bit, but then the bad debt chickens came home to roost, the credit card division took hundreds of millions in charge offs for noncollectable debts, and everybody got a sharp reminder of why we
hadn't previously issued cards to those folks.
Our Region Credit Officer was scathing in his comments. Al had been in credit for decades, and had forgotten more about it than most mere mortals would ever learn. But they hadn't asked Al's opinion, and wouldn't have wanted to hear it if they had, because he would have said "No. This is a bad idea. You're stupid!"
My SO and I have accumulated a number of cards. We've been deliberately culling the herd, dropping cards with higher APRs, and occasionally doing balance transfers to cards with lower APRs when paying down debt. We also historically sent
double the minimum payment each due date (cash flow permitting.)
The end result has been a credit score that's quite high, thank you. We get periodic notes from issuers that make my SO say "X just
raised our credit limit again!" "So? We charge things. We run up balances. We pay the balances off in half the maximum time we could take. That's the sort of customer they like, so they raise our limit. Since we have no plans to actually use that card, who cares?" "I guess..."
The basic problem for credit card issuers is that the market is saturated. Pretty much everyone who could
get a credit card has one. So they are all trying to raid each other's market share and get customers to switch, or take on another card, or incur additional debt to run up balances they can charge fees on. We get multiple offers like that in our mailbox each week. We call it "land fill", and it goes into the trash unopened.
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Dennis