Tuesday, April 7, 2009

Bank of America credit card conversation

Warning: I'm not too happy right now and there may be some not so nice language in this post.

Wow! So, we have taken the advice of calling our high interest credit cards and asking for a rate reduction.

This woman (a supervisor) will not reduce the interest rate.

What she IS going to do is lower our credit limit. This sucks because it will raise our debt ratio, and in turn lower our credit rating. She says this will help. DH is trying to tell her it won't. She won't listen. We're trying to get someone above her and she is saying she is the top. Bullshit. DH is being really good, calm, persistent, and knowledgeable.

We have been good customers. We have a high balance, they've been making around $200 per month in interest from us, and we want something in return. Instead they fuck us again. Now it's time to take our business elsewhere. The interest rate is 23.99%. Screw that.

Good thing we have a 0% transfer offer. We will be transferring our Bank of America balance to another card and never using them again.

We won't be closing the account, because that could hurt our credit rating, but we will never use it again (other than the occasional tank of gas that gets paid immediately).

edited to add:

Our current balance with this card is $8,762.50
Our current limit is $14,700.00

We owe appx. 60%

She is cutting our limit to the amount we currently owe, hence making us owe 100%.

We are done with Bank of America.

3 comments:

Bree said...

Oh phew that totally sucks. I've given up on credit card companies and banks in general. I'm beginning to understand why people use to keep their money in their mattress. This coming from a person who worked in the business for 16 years.

Amanda said...

That totally happend to my friend a few weeks ago...right before her wedding!! They'd been great credit card customers for twelve years and were wanting to raise their credit limit and when she called the cut it by a lot! So they were in a lot of trouble. I don't think they are telling the truth that it'll "help" you by cutting down your limit. Maybe that's their new policy? People who call get their limit lowered? I'm sticking with my credit union account...not dealing with banks.

Me... said...

I'm still so mad! I'll be writing a letter soon and I will blog it and any response that I get.

Amanda, that sucks that your friend had that happen right before the wedding! But, maybe a good thing? Most of our debt is from our wedding.

I emailed all the financial blogs that I read about this, and no one had heard of this happening, so it must be a new thing.

I'm totally taking Suze Orm's (I know I butchered her name) new advice. We're paying minimum on our other cards and building a $4-5,000 savings. We can't rely on credit being there if we have an emergency. Once we have that savings built, we will go back to aggressively paying the credit cards. It's going to slow our plan down, but I think it will be best in the end. Especially if we have a job loss or anything.