September 7, 2007
Fighting with Bank of America
I’m not a fan of paying high interest on credit cards, which is part why I opened a 0% card to transfer. I’m thinking I may need to open something else if I cannot get anywhere with Bank of America. Currently I am at 17.24% which is down from 25.24% when they screwed up a payment because of a Saturday, the computer said it was late, I called them up and got the late fee cleared, but my APR got rocked the next month. I got this rate down a few months ago and decided to call them up again to see if they’ll lower it more.
After a long hold time I got to the first person who cannot do much of anything so they transferred me to an account manager to handle my question. Waiting on an inner hold even longer, I finally got someone to talk to me. Asked them for a lower rate and they told me my rate was the best they could do for me. I told them other companies are giving me offers for 9.9% and lower, but she wouldn’t budge.
So this is where I start to get frustrated and annoyed. I asked them why they won’t lower my rate and they said the rate is based on several factors. They look at the overall balance in relation to credit limit, amount of monthly payments, and how much I use the credit card per billing cycle. She then went on and told me a credit card is a short term loan. By using it I am borrowing money from them at the best rate I can get, but then they expect a payment for that. I told her I don’t like to be lectured on how a credit card works and corrected her that a credit card is a revolving line, not a term loan.
This is where it got real interesting. I told her if I bought $200 in gas per month on my card, then added $200 to my regular payment, would that lower the rate? She told me yes it would! That doesn’t make any sense that I can increase the balance and payment just to get a better rate from Bank of America. I would still be paying down the same amount but they don’t see it like that. It’s not worth fighting with them anymore and I think I’m going to transfer that balance to something else. It will be nice to get my smaller cards paid off so I could really focus on paying these other cards with higher balances off quicker.
Comments(5)