My Story
Pretend you are a graduate student squeeking by on your stipend
along with your wife, who is also a graduate student.
Now pretend you have a credit card with a balance of a few thousand
dollars. You paid the balance down considerably just three
months ago and the company sent you notice to tell you how wonderful
of a customer you are, so they are raising your credit limit.
Things are peachy, right? Wrong. It's been three
months since you were a wonderful customer and you receive a
little piece of paper filled with tiny print that explains that
your interest rate will be jumping to 23% in a little over four
weeks! Why? "A credit report shows that you were
delinquent on an account." It turns out that a reporting
agency has allegedly notified the credit card company that you
were delinquent paying another account. No, not
the credit card company's account, some other mysterious account.
And of course, that's all they will tell you.
What to do now? Well, the credit card company will agree
not to raise the rate if you contact the credit
reporting agency, get the report, identify the problem, resolve
it, get the report cleaned up, and get the new credit information
to them in the next four weeks. That's just great.
Of course, if everything goes perfectly, it will take two weeks
just to receive the credit report. Why? Well,
the agency will not give information out over the phone and
you
have to submit a stream of verbal data via an automated recording
system to have a copy mailed to you. Of course, there's
that lovely disclaimer: if any of the information is incomplete,
incorrect, etc. you get no report. Hmm, you definitely
want to speak clearly.
Freeze the old terms and close the account, paying it off at
the current interest rate, you say? No, they don't do
that. As a matter of fact, the first person you talk to
tells you that no one does that, even after you tell them repeatedly
that you have already done a similar thing with two other credit
cards for trying to raise their interest rate. The reason?
The operator says that it's because Rhode Island is an island.
Hmm, maybe Rhode Island is evil, but since Anne Hutchinson (1592-1643)
sought refuge there with her notion of the holy spirit residing
in everyone, I am loathe to say that. :-)
What does happen if you close your account? The interest rate
skyrockets to the mid twenties!
Guess who the credit card company is? Fleet Credit
Card Services.
Well, we got our credit report and we also received a letter
from Fleet explaining their reasons. They explained that they
raised our interest rate because of the balances on our other
credit cards. No, not because we did anything wrong and not
for the specific reason they
gave. Recall, they claimed we were late on another account;
that was not true.
The most obvious reason to do this is because a credit company
could
expect to safely gouge a person for more money if they have
too many credit charges to allow them to have the cash flow
to pay them off. It is akin to kicking someone when they
are
down. Fortunately for us, we were not impotent in this case.
But let me discuss what we did.
While we waited for our credit report, we tried to contact
someone "above" the customer service reps (CSR). We
were told that there was no voice extension for the "executive
office" but we were given a fax number. I did not expect
this to do anything, but I did still send a fax to them asking
for more time to get our credit reports and take care of the
paperwork to convince them to keep our old interest rate. This
only produced letters reiterating the imminent interest rate
hike.
Now let me point out again the big problem here - NOTHING
WAS WRONG WITH OUR CREDIT. We had done nothing wrong. We had
paid
people
on time, especially Fleet. So there was nothing to fix on the
credit report. Which in effect means that we had been sent
on
a wild goose chase, wasting hours of
our time over the
span of weeks.
Conclusion? We paid them off within 90 days of the start of
this farce and we now shred every new offer they send us. There
are people that have e-mailed me about closed accounts that
accrued
fees
and
interest.
Nifty little trick.
Fleet has done every bad or evil thing I have ever worried
about a credit card company doing, short of a hit squad. Of
course that's only in movies, right? Maybe I should duck now.
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