Credit Card Companies Can...

[use your imagination to fill in the rest.]

As an American citizen concerned about the well being of her fellow American citizens I would like to warn everyone against using Citi-Mastercard...ever. Josh and I only have two credit cards, and we're working on paying them off completely, never to be used again, and hopefully we'll reach that goal by 2010. We've moved 7 times in the past 4 years; CC's have been a necessary evil.

But back to Citi...they're shady dealers. They moved our payment due date, and the automatic payment that is debited from our checking EVERY month for the past year was "late". As a result, they hiked our interest rate from 9% to,get this, 28.99%Josh called and spoke nicely to them, and we received an e-mail stating we'd be getting the original interest rate back...awesome, thank you, much appreciated.

HOWever, I talked to them today regarding a program that lowers the interest rate by an additional 6% if 60% of the card is paid of in 3 billing cycles...who comes up with this crap, by the way? I was informed our interest rate was still at 28.99%. Not only that, but once we paid 60% off they'd lower our credit line to $1,000 above the balance post 60% pay off, making my used percentage of available credit at 90%...not good. Again, who is getting paid to create these "incentive" programs?

I realize that we're dealing with borrowed dollars and cents here, and I'm all about paying them off quickly, but, whatever happened to customer loyalty incentives that one can understand without a college finance course? We've never been late...not ONCE until the sneaky move on their part. We don't even deal with the bill in paper form...it's ALL automatic-electronic-technology based bill pay.

SICK OF IT. Citi: you'll get your money, then a nastygram that won't do any good other than providing me with a small sense of "stickin' it to the man".

P.S. And all those credit card companies sitting underneath the shade trees at University campuses across our nation offering your little coozies and cheap T-shirts, you should be ashamed of yourselves.

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