January 23,2009
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Your Story: Deception Exposed, Pt.3
– ‘Auto Payments'.Now, we move on the worst type of credit card payment problems – the automatic ones. These are so bad because they go undetected until it's way too late to fix. This was the case with ‘BlackMonday' who did follow the advice to do the ‘right thing' by signing up for credit card ‘auto-payments'. Since everything was predictable, it was believed that everything should always go right. The credit card statements "ALWAYS" arrived on the same day of the month.
But, one day it all changed behind the scenes. Chase, it seems, saw fit to move the credit card payment due date up 5 days. The next thing ‘BlackMonday knew, the automatic payment registered as being a day late. The immediate result was an APR hike from a fixed 3.99% all the way up to 15.99%. Even though the payments have never been late since, the damage is done. This problem continues to hurt countless others also, as the next write-ins continue with even worse cases of ruthless credit card industry practices.
Another auto payments ‘gotcha' is reported by ‘jackamo' and the wisdom gained can likely benefit a very large number of credit card consumers. It concerns those savvy and responsible card holders who set up automatic payments so payments are never late and don't require so much maintenance and overhead on the consumer. This is, generally, considered to be a very smart way to go.
Again, like the earlier response, Chase had arbitrarily advanced the ‘payment due date' without proper notification to the responsible and prudent credit card holder. In this case, the added measure of care didn't pay off. This time, Chase performed the indiscretion. By advancing the pay date without sufficient warning, this person didn't catch the anomaly until the second event and was slammed with penalties for two months in a row ($70). This derailment occurred after a two-year perfect record of paying early. No ‘load-out' here but, two demerits for Chase.