Johnny Chin

I’ve been a Chase Bank customer for 25+ years. Today I received my credit card statement and it showed an amount due. I found that odd because I didn’t charge anything since I paid off the statement last month. Looking into it I found that …
late fee $15, posted 11/22.
full payment $49, posted 11/23.
finance charge of $1, posted 11/27.
statement closing date 11/27 with an amount due of $16 (all fees).

WTF! This is ridiculous! $16 in fees for a $49 charge for one-day late! That is almost loan-sharking at 979.59% per MONTH (which equals to 11755.10% per year). Gee wouldn’t it be nice to make those kinds of returns! If any citizen did this, they would be locked up!

I then proceeded to call Chase and see if they can reverse the charges. The first customer service rep said “Late is late. And you are late by one day, so there is nothing that I can do. Unless it is a Chase fault, we cannot do anything.” She then proceed to try and sell me a credit protection service. I hung up and called back. The 2nd customer service rep was even worse. He basically said, “there is nothing I can do and if you don’t like our policy, you can close the account.”

Holy crap! I guess they don’t like customers who pay off their credit card bills each month, despite the fact they make 2-3% off the merchants where I use their cards.

Another surprise. When I called back a 3rd time, the customer service rep told me that Chase sent out a notice with their statements a few months ago stating that there is a 5-day change in their grace period. She claims that Chase increased the grace period to 20-days. Upon more careful examination, I found that Chase reduced it to 20-days; but that is not all and this is what I found:
My statement closing dates were always the 27th or 28th of the month and my charges were due on the same day (historically for years).
Now, my statements still close on the same 27th or 28th. However, the due dates are now 5-6 days earlier! To make things worse, I’ve noticed that my statements are not arriving before the 1st of the month like they used to. Instead, they are now arriving around the 4th or 5th of the month. So this means they are holding (or printing late) the statements before they mail them out. This basically cuts the time we have to look over the statements before paying them, down to less than 10 days from 20 days (taking into account 2-5 days Chase holds the money before posting it to the credit card account). In my recent case, the funds cleared out of my bank on the 20th, yet Chase posted it on my statement on the 23rd.

This royally sucks! Chase is basically playing with our money for those few days all interest free and yet, they want to rape their long-time customers because they are not making enough from us simply paying on-time (fundamentally no risk to Chase for making 1-3% per charge from the merchants, after the upto 1% cash back they give the card holder). Chase now wants their good paying customers to pay them 200-300% per year like those higher risk customers who defaults or file bankruptcy.

Totally ridiculous. I guess this is the way JP Morgan Chase makes up the money their investment banking side is losing to rival Goldman Sacks. Something has to look decent on the balance sheets for their shareholders.

Well as of today, I am going to move all of my monthly recurring charges to non-Chase cards (and I have a few Chase cards). The Amazon.com, Buy.com and Toys-R-Us cards now going into the drawer and staying there (except for the one charge per year to keep the card active). I am not closing the accounts as that would end up hurting my credit score with a lower debt to credit ratio (as per Suze Orman).

I hope you don’t experience this yourself.