The Effects Of The Missed Payment

In the article The Red Camera That Put me In The Red, I told how my mistake with my checking account led to numerous overdraft fees and one of my credit card payments being rejected by the bank.  This wasn’t just any credit card either.

This was a card I had paid off once before and then they sent me some of those balance transfer checks that offered a 5.99% interest rate for any balances transferred.  They also raised my credit limit to something like $15,000.

My wife and I had used this offer to consolidate a few other cards and it was saving us a lot of money on interest.

When I realized this was the account that didn’t get paid I knew I was in trouble.  When I got paid the next week, I went online to submit a payment to them, only to find out that my ability to make payments over the Internet had been taken away because of the returned payment.  I called their customer service and was told I could make a payment over the phone with my debit card and that I could go back to making online payments next month.

A few days later I got a letter stating they were raising my interest rate to 24.99% since I had missed a payment. It also stated: “We will lower APRs from the default APR on all balances if you meet the terms of all Card Agreements you have with us for 12 billing periods in a row.  We may lower these APRs sooner based on your record with us.”

That gave me hope.  Once I forgot to send a payment to Chase and they raised my rates to an outrageous amount.  I called and told them I didn’t think it was fair after I’d been such a good customer for so long and had just forgotten that one payment.  They told me they would review it and let me know in about a week.  I got a letter saying they were going to return my rates to what they were before.  I figured if it worked with Chase, it’d work with this other company too.

I was going to wait until I made my next on-payment before I asked them to lower the rates.  Due to the changes in the rate, my minimum payment went from $180.00 to $418.00.  I was afraid I couldn’t make that payment, so I figured it would defeat the purpose of getting them to lower the rate, if I was just going to default again.

I did everything I could to bring in a little extra money.  I even went to Ebay and sold some of my favorite singer’s rarest CDs and memorabilia.  I managed to come up with enough to pay it and went to the web site to submit an online payment.  I was still locked out.

I called customer service and asked if they could review my account and possibly reduce the interest rate.  She claimed that it would happen automatically after I made payments for a year and they couldn’t do it any other way.  Then I told her the site wouldn’t let me pay and was told that the web site would allow me to make the online payment one month after I made the payment via phone.  “OK, “ I said.  “I’ll need to make this payment with my debit card then.”  She said she couldn’t take phone payments.  I told her that’s how I made the last payment.  She said that I must have been transferred to their collections department since I was late and they could take the payment over the phone.  I asked her to transfer me to them again and she said I wasn’t in default yet.  “

I was getting very frustrated and was fighting to keep from losing my temper.  I always try to stay as professional as possible when in situations like this, but I think if I’d had a blood pressure monitor on my arm it might have exploded!  I told her there had to be a person there that I could talk to that could do a review of my account.  She told me she was going to put me on hold.

When she came back she had another lady on the phone and said she was an Account Supervisor or something like that

I told her that if she’d look at my record, she’d see that I’d been a customer of there’s since 1994 and had always kept my account paid.  I told her they were forcing me to be late again by refusing to take a payment over the phone.

“Sir, I’ll take that payment right now. What’s your debit card number?”  When that was done, she said they would remove the $39.00 late fee from the previous month and order a review of my account. Everything she said was the opposite of the first lady.  I guess you just have to insist to talk to a supervisor.

Now I just had to wait for that letter to come in the mail telling me they would reduce my rate back down to 5.99%.