Occupy the Board Room!

Your extraordinary generosity | 20  

Hi!

In 2008 I lost my job, but I kept making my Visa Chase credit card payments.  I was sooo looking forward to Feb. 2009 when that card would be paid off, and I could tick down one less monthly bill to pay. I had been paying this down at a monthly rate, by then, for three years.

In the meantime, my mother, who is on a fixed income, couldn't always afford to put gas in her car.  I took out a BP Chase gas card (this was before the Gulf disaster) and sent it to her to use, and I paid. I even let this go on while I was on unemployment--because she really only gets about $650 a month to live on, so I knew I would eventually get work, and she had to get to doctors' appointments somehow.

Well, Feb. 2009 came and I did it!  I sent in my last Visa Chase payment.  Three weeks later, I got hired for a job overseas... and away I went!

So, every month I called from where I was and paid my BP Chase gas card.

Then, sometime in August, I get word from Home Depot, which I had just finished paying off, that, like, poof! They were terminating my card. I was flabbergasted. All during unemployment I paid all my bills. Why, suddenly, out of nowhere, would a credit card company cut off my card?

So, I get a copy of my credit report. Again I was flabbergasted. I owed my Chase Visa $220. How the hades did I owe them any money when I had paid them off?

Seems that my final bill was not actually my final bill. See, though I paid off what was listed, interest had accrued--so at the end of Feb. 2009 I still owed Chase Visa $6. Every month after that I had been charged a late fee. Chase Visa reported my six months of being late to the credit bureaus, and, my credit rating fell 200 points.

I called up Chase Visa immediately and asked what could be done--I said, look, I had paid this off. They would not budge. I said, look, every month I even spoke with a Chase representative to pay my BP Chase gas card--why in the world when I paid that like clockwork would I not also pay this? I did learn that yes, indeed, the Chase representative could see both my accounts, the Visa and the BP, but no one ever told me the other account was in arrears. No one asked me about paying that account when I called. Instead, they let me rack up $214 in fees.

So, this being just after the bank bailout, I asked for some leniency--okay, I will pay this, but can you please at least send a letter to the credit bureaus taking this off my account?

Chase refused.

I had no recourse because they hold the big guns and this amount of money was only a lunch meeting for some executive, but for me, it meant that now, when returning to the US, it was going to be difficult to nearly impossible to get credit clearance to rent an apartment, much less getting approval for buying a house.

It has taken me nearly two years to regain part of my credit rating back.

Thanks, bankers. Thanks for taking my tax money to bail out yourselves when you had terribly poor judgment, and then turning around and screwing me with fees and then royally screwing my credit over for $220 freaking dollars. Thanks for limiting my living opportunities and my access to credit that I could pay.

Glad you are as generous with your indentured “customers” as the American public has been with you.