Posted on 02/02/2009 11:36:30 AM PST by Clairity
You probably know that credit card companies have been scrutinizing every charge on your account in recent years, searching for purchases that thieves may have made. Turns out, though, that some of the companies have been suspicious of you, too.
In recent months, American Express has gone far beyond simply checking your credit score and making sure you pay on time. The company has been looking at home prices in your area, the type of mortgage lender you're using and whether small-business card customers work in an industry under siege. It has also been looking at how you spend your money, searching for patterns or similarities to other customers who have trouble paying their bills.
In some instances, if it didn't like what it was seeing, the company has cut customer credit lines. It laid out this logic in letters that infuriated many of the cardholders who received them. "Other customers who have used their card at establishments where you recently shopped," one of those letters said, "have a poor repayment history with American Express."
(Excerpt) Read more at finance.yahoo.com ...
Our CC company froze our account due to the FR transaction. It was cleared up with a phone call, but still... Last month there was a suspicious $1.00 charge (that was, indeed, fraud). We had to get a new card. We, too, are weening ourselves from their grasp, as well as all the monthly charges we can. We’ve been a couple of months without TV now and are amazed at what a good decision THAT was. 60-70 bucks a month for hundreds of channels of worthless propaganda. It feels so good to not support that crap anymore.
They certainly have.
For quite some time they were a great company. I went from green card to gold card to platinum card, but in between the last two they were changing their attitudes.
I've given up on them as a bad partner.
Yup. I knew/know that but I didn't ever order their movies.
I’ll probably do something like that. I’m not going to cut my nose off to spite my face, but I was tweaked to say the least.
Not good for your credit rating, though, if you do that.
Well, I’m not happy with them, but I’m not going to cancel the card. I’m just going to use it less, much much less.
I have a Citi AA advantage card. I always pay it off or there wouldn't be any point in having the card. They just jacked up my rate 3% to 17%. They ought to be dropping rates to entice people like me to borrow. The form letter informing me of the rate increase also lectured me on using credit wisely. This from a bank that made something like a trillion dollars in bad loans.
I would send them a thanks but no thanks for the opportunity to pay 17% interest.
IMO, anything over about 12% is userous. When it gets up about 29%, they should be locking people up and throwing away the key.
We recently paid off our Chase Amazon credit card, and today we got the first bill with the zero balance. Guess what it said our effective annual percentage rate was:
74.09%!!!!!!
I’m not kidding. So we called them right up and closed the account, which was the reason we paid it off anyway, because the month before, they had raised it to 34%.
We also got a bump in the interest rate on our Citicard, to an effective rate of 15%, so we’re going to shut that one off too as soon as we pay it off with a line of credit from the credit union. We’ve never missed a payment on that one in over 10 years. It’s our American Airlines mileage card, and we’re shutting it off. Will they take 2/3s if we offer only that much?
I don’t blame you. Be careful of agreements to pay down cards by a percentage such as 2/3rds. Many of them will report it to the credit rating companies. That can ding your credit.
It cost $5 to not plug it in.
My credit rating is near 800. If it is bumped a few points it would be worth it.
22 years is a heck of a plus on your credit scores.
++++++++++++++++++++++++
Many of us don’t give a hoot about scores, especially those of us who owe nothing to nobody and don’t plan or need to. I had AMEX cards of various colors over the years and finally wondered why I thought I needed it. It’s all hype, credit scores and color of card status and the false sense that you had to have AMEX to be worthy of anything. Nonsense and bull!!!!
I cancelled after 32 years of having one and now charge to other brands and payoff monthly just as I did with AMEX and discovered that I really am a person even without AMEX. There are thousands of us out there who really exist without AMEX and we get along just fine without it.
The problem is not that they are looking at your history, the problem is that they are punishing individuals for the action of others.
I think if the customer closes their own CC it doesn’t impact their credit rating. If you would close all your cards, that would leave you with no credit available, that probably would harm your rating.
They affect your insurance rates, employment at many places, any loan you make - emergency perhaps, credit offered for medical bills, and on and on. Credit scores affect a lot more than most people think. More than they should, but they do.
I know this isn’t popular, but closing an account (or having zero balance which doesn’t report) lowers your FICO score, which other credit issuers monitor, which can lower you limit, which lowers your score, which creditors monitor who can increase your annual rate...
And on and on. It’s a cycle folks have to stay ahead of and know how it works.
Common misconception. Doesn't matter who closes it. What matters is you lose a positive credit tradeline. And the longer (older) that line was, the more it hurts your score.
Should have pinged you to post #38.
Congratulations on your 800. If you have a lot of lines, and a lot of revolving as well, and a lot of old lines (which you likely do) closing one line won’t hurt your score too much - unless that line is contributing substantially to lowering your debt/limit ratio.
Boy, I hear you. AmEx tweaked me bigtime about a year ago. But, like you say, nose and face - use them and don't let them use you.
In general right now, everyone I trust in the credit world says, lower your debt/balances as much as you possibly can - but keep a very small balance at least to keep the line reporting and keep the issuer from closing it.
Cash is king now, but if high inflation begins, things change and if possible you always want to keep credit available at the lowest rate possible. In a nutshell: lower your debt; guard your scores.
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