March 11, 2010
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Paying over to reduce that high-interest portion, Pt.3
Credit card banks 1; Consumers 0.I called Chase today to find out why the "paid over" portion of the credit card payment wasn't applied to the highest portion of the credit card balance. Wouldn't you know, they'd skirt the protection from the get-go. Even though the credit card statement didn't close until 3/3, because my friend had sent the payment in three days before the regs went into effect, they disregarded the regs and squeezed that last dime out of my friend in interest charges. From now on though, they admitted that they won't be able to do that anymore (they'll just find another way around it, I suppose).
Please understand here, that this is not a bash against JP Morgan/Chase. They're not the bad apples of the credit card industry. They're just typical. Fact is they've been fairly good to me. "Fairly" here applies two ways. One way means "better then most, though not the best" and the other meaning is "during tough times, we can't prudently be as generous as we'd like", that's fair. For the story on the many ways Chase was good to me with their 0% interest-credit card offers, please refer to my news article entitled: "Some of the many ways Chase was good to me."
The lesson to be learned here is that working with reasonable credit card lenders is like a chess game. Once you learn the strategies, you can participate in a very gratifying venture. You can make the people you deal with at the bank ("front-end people") look good by opening accounts and being responsible. They, in turn, are more then happy to offer you sweet deals. This is the mutual gratification.
On the other hand, you can get burned by the "back-end people" at the bank (people behind the scenes who spend their time cooking up ways to squeeze profits out of the credit card consumers). Front-end people and back-end people never meet each other and are very different from each other (these banks are huge). The front-end people want to please you, the back-end people want to squeeze you. Learn the game rules from these articles and reap the rewards I share in the article linked above. You too, can enjoy endless rewards instead of getting burned.