Lovely, Just Lovely.
As a “valued customer” my APR on a credit card I carry a balance on has skyrocketed from sucky 17.7% to a ludicrous 24.7%. That’s a 39.5% increase! That used to be what we’d consider default! Yeah, I feel really fucking valued right now. Oh, and the kick in the nuts is that even if I closed the account to reject the new terms, the new APR will go into effect anyway because the balance isn’t zero. I really love how these new “protect the consumer” regulations the government is putting into effect next year have pushed the banks to really hammer the current customers. Way to go! It looks like I’ll be pulling money out of my reserve fund to pay off as much of that balance as possible as quickly as possible. It’s so jacked up that they only give eleven days notice!
They must not like that I got another card and didn’t close the old one, back when I had that stolen account number snafu with my everyday card and they took more than a week to “expedite” me a replacement. I decided to just leave the old one open for “emergencies” and haven’t used it in the last four months. This is such bullshit, but whatever, I can expect it to happen on all of my cards now, issuing banks act like dominoes. I hate how when you presumably do everything right you’re still fucked, never late, paid more than the minimum and generally by a very significant margin, never over the limit, nowhere near “maxed out” in any fashion. Now I don’t know if I should close it immediately, even though I’ll still be screwed by the higher interest, or if I should still rapidly pay it down, but keep it open. Leaving the account open would seem to reward them for their evil ways, but the credit voodoo may punish me if I close it. It would seem my increased available credit, even though my debt did not increase, caused this to happen. I was under the impression that a low utilization of credit was a good thing, guess not. That is, of course, unless my “identity” has been “stolen” by someone, which is extremely doubtful. I apparently have to write letters to the bank and credit bureaus in order to get explanations. You’d think they’d give at least some nebulous reason in their “we think you suck and are going to make you pay for it” type notices. Funny thing, just a couple months ago they actually increased my credit line.
Argh, I’m so angry, in that trembling about ready to strike sort of way. Especially so because they’re not only jacking the rate hard, but at the same time trying to sell their moronic credit protection service to gouge me out of even more money!
I bet the assholes at the issuing bank won’t even let me close it over the phone… It’ll be just one more way they can treat me as a “valued customer.”
Perhaps the answer would be to transfer the remaining balance over to one of my other cards, even with the fee they’ll likely charge, it’ll beat paying almost 25% interest, but unfortunately the accounts that could accept the balance have “no offers available.” I must have contracted the credit equivalent of the plague somehow.
Oh, and this comes after a “notice left” by the lazy son of a bitch mailman, on a package for my niece’s birthday, in which no delivery attempt was even made. There’s no physical notice, so it might just be a stupidity on the part of the USPS as a whole, but in any event I filed an electronic “bring my shit to me you jackasses” request.
Oh, and all that bullshit distracted me from what I was doing at the time and I flooded the bathroom with aquarium water. I was in the middle of a water change on the 75 gallon and needed to fill a bucket with water for when I cleaned a filter later tonight. Silly me, trying to multitask, not expecting near the level of insanity that I encountered when I sat down.
