The Chase Credit Card Weasels
…suddenly decided to raise their minimum payment from 2% to 5%. In my case this meant that my monthly payment went from $303 to $744.
I’ve never missed a payment, I’ve never been late…hey, I’m a model citizen. This isn’t cz I breached any part of the agreement.
This is apparently because Chase is furious with us cardholders because, when several years ago they sent out balance transfer offers of around 3.9% fixed for life—-get this—-we had the unmitigated gall to ACCEPT!
Well we ought to be ashamed, who do we think we are? Can you blame Chase for trying to get back at us? And as if that weren’t enough, not only do we go and accept their offer, we make it that much harder on ourselves by paying on time! As agreed!
Well now we’re just asking for it. Chase was provoked! How can they make any money if we don’t ever miss a payment? Why, if we’re never ever ten minutes late with a payment, then how can they kick in that 29% default rate, or tack on those $39 late fees, or shower us with overlimit fees, or underlimit fees, or processing fees, or arbitration fees, or incurring-too-many-fees fees, or anything like that! Why, they’ll have to…(gulp)…
live up to the terms of their offer!!!!
We brought this on ourselves. We backed them into a corner, what choice did they have?
And, apparently, in this case, for some reason, you don’t have the option to write them and reject the changes to your agreement.
I don’t understand. I always thought that if you didn’t like changes a credit card company made to your account, you could write within a certain time and reject the changes, close the account, and pay off the remaining balance as agreed. If that’s not true, if credit card companies really can change the agreement whenever they like, why have an agreement? Why doesn’t Chase just say, “Here’s a card, now go put money on it. Okay great. Now when you get our statement, we’ll just put down any figure we want, and you just shut up and pay it. This will save everyone a lot of trouble in the long run. Well, us, anyway.”
So, in short, we, the American People, are screwed again. Thanks so much, Chase! You do realize that the economy sucks right now, and no one has money? Even during good times I don’t have an extra $450 lying around.
You remember this whole recession thing, don’t you? I’m sure you must, I mean, you’re a big part of the reason no one has money, we ‘gave’ $50 billion of our money to you. What? What’s that? Oh, that money’s spent already. You want more money. I see.
Well this is a great plan. Good luck to you. I hope every one of your customers defaults on their accounts. As for me, if I end up having to stop paying someone I owe money to because of the economy, guess who it will be? That’s right. Chase will be the first one to get the shaft.
If you’ve been touched by this benevolent organization, here’s
Who to complain to:
- OCC (Office of the Comptroller of the Currency)
This is apparently an agency that all banks have to report to, and they don’t like it when people complain about them there, but since most people’ve never heard the OCC, it’s not that big a problem. Me, I’m down with OCC. - Federal Trade Commission
I had to use Firefox, Internet Explorer didn’t want to let me scroll downwards. And be careful, if you take too long it’ll time out. - Senators and Congressmen
Just type in your Zip code and you can find out who they are, then click on them to contact them. I wrote them all. What the heck. - Maybe the Attorney General in your state?
What else to do:
Well, I, like all of you, have around 40 Chase cards of various species. They’re simply not going to get used any more. So not only will Chase not get late fees, or default interest rate fees, or any of those other fees they weren’t quite able to charge me; now they won’t even get the fees they were charging to retailers every time I bought something.
It’s okay, because I have around 96 credit cards that aren’t Chase, so I’ll switch over to one of those, until it tries something crooked like this, then I’ll switch again, and so on; and when I get tired of all the switching, well, you know what? Despite Chase’s efforts, most places I know still take cash.
Want to read more? Here’s an article about all this that sums it up pretty nicely, and here’s another one—-be sure to read the comments from all the people who have been hurt by this.
