CHASE-ING After Your Hard Earned Money

[ehong33234]

I consider myself to be pretty fair. If I screw up, I'll be the first one to admit it.

Having said that, I have been a CHASE credit card account holder for 10+ years with a promotional 3.99% APR for the life of the loan. I have never made a late payment on this account and my credit score is in the high 700's. When Chase bought out WAMU, I thought it would be a good idea for me to setup bi-weekly auto pay from what is now a Chase checking account (formerly WAMU). After all, it would only take 1 day to post the payment since it is transferring within the same institution. Great. Not so fast!

They have a bi-weekly payment option for their credit card which for those of you who know the credit card game, it is advantageous from an interest perspective to split your monthly minimum payment into bi-weekly payments. Sure enough, I went this route and what a big mistake.

The payments posted fine for months without any problems but one day, I got a letter saying that my account payment was LATE and that my promotional APR on a substantial balance due would skyrocket almost by triple the APR. Frantically I called to ask what this was about and what happened was, the bi-weekly payments screwed me over.

What Chase does is nothing short of conniving. They have what's called a billing cycle that varies from your statement cycle. For instance, my statement cycle for January 2010 is from January 1 - 31, however, my billing cycle is actually January 7 - February 6. What this means is that my auto-payment that may post January 6 due to a scheduled bi-weekly payment plan will go towards my December 2009 bill and NOT January's, even though my due date for December 2009 has long passed. Confused yet? Well where this royally screws me is that my next bi-weekly payment initiates 2 weeks later, only 5 days before my due date and this is only my first payment! Wanna know what happened to my next bi-weekly payment? They hold it because it falls on a weekend or for what they call "processing time" and so I miss my January minimum payment because of this.

Had I been forewarned by Chase during the setup of my payments that there were so many factors at play on how my payment is handled, I would not be in this mess.

The worst part about it is that I have made numerous calls and written numerous emails to Chase about this mishap and they won't budge. I have my auto-finance with them, credit cards, money market, checking and savings and still, this institution that reported record earnings last quarter (7 billion) won't work with a long time patron and honest customer like myself.

Then they have the audacity to tell me, I have several options to choose from.

Option 1: Deal with the rate hike!
Option 2: Close your account for good and lose 10+ years of customer history (not to mention the negative affect closing an account has on your credit score)

CHASE... REALLY, DO YOU THINK THIS IS FAIR?

[cb.reallysucks.net]

Of course it's not fair. They're assholes.
The same (similar enough) thing bit me on my balance liquidation program they put me on after hiking my minimum payment 250%. I specifically asked if I could pay split on my paychecks rather than all at once per month. Well, now I'm in collections because of the same shenanigans. Interesting note, the service is slowly getting better the farther behind I get. It's not customer service, it's the fear they won't get their money back!
-cbrs

[ehong33234]

@cbrs - I certainly know how you feel and I hope your run-ins with Chase get resolved in your favor.

As for me, I have an update to my post. Sure enough, after countless rejections over the phone and email, I finally had enough and filed a complaint with the BBB. I stated that their website and their auto-payment feature was misleading because it did not supply enough information for the consumer to make an educated decision on what type of plan to choose. If there was any mention of the posting dates and billing cycles, etc., one could easily avoid this type of problem. I surely would have known better.

So on a good note (after a lot of rejection), I got a call today from a nice Chase representative named Naomi and she said she is happy to report that my rate increase is canceled and that I will receive a letter shortly in the mail. NICE! Granted it was frustrating having to go through what I had to for this type of response but I am happy about this small victory on the side of David versus Goliath.

What's even better is that the Chase representative said they are making changes to their terms so billing cycles and statement cycles coincide to avoid confusion. She said letters like mine have voiced a great cause of concern about this mis-practice that hurts good, honest paying customers.

This post in it's entirety is not to say that Chase will respond this way to everyone's claim, so there is no guarantee (of course), but I am just sharing my experience so hopefully it can help others down the road.