Carrying balance or not, the CSR has no idea of Customer Service at all.

I can only speculate why CC companies would jack up the interest rates of the so called “Free Loaders”. With an economy that is still not out of the woods yet, CC companies may be counting on at least few responsible CC users to default and carry a balance. I guess it is a numbers game for them, if they jack up interest rates of 100 responsible consumers and 5 of them default in the coming months, that’s additional income for CC companies that they did not have before.

The biggest reason they do this is because there will be loss of some revenue for CC companies when the new laws take effect on Feb-2010 and jacking up interest rates on more consumers might help them bridge that gap.

“New York Times warned this exact thing a few weeks ago right after the new credit card laws were passed. NY Times mentioned that CC companies were going to go after consumers like you a.k.a “Free Loaders” in CC company lingo.”

I’ve read this a few times as well, but I’m having a hard time understanding the reasoning behind it. Jacking the interest rate up for the “free loaders” accomplishes nothing b/c the free loaders don’t pay any interest. It would make more since for the CC issuers to reduce the amount of available credit to free-loaders – that way there is more to lend to the people who don’t pay their balances off each month. They could also bring back the good old annual fee or get rid of the interest grace period so that NOBODY could escape certain charges.

I’m a free loader. I love being a free loader. I use and abuse the grace period every month, never pay a dime of interest, and get rewards in the form of awesome Best Buy gift cards for FREE! The current rates on my cards are of no concern to me – they can jack it up all they want. It would be a different story though if the grace period wasn’t there or if I was paying an annual fee. I would probably stop using credit all together at that point depending on the changes.

*shrug*

Unless they sweeten the deal by giving you $25 to smooth over that SNAFU.. they don’t deserve you

Even if it is your oldest CC.

I closed my oldest CCs just because I don’t care about my credit report right now. (Am planning on moving soon to U.S… where everything resets)

Anyway, my whole report is spotless with no debts, no late payments, and if lenders want to play stupid with me just because of some numbers on a report, they can keep their business and I’ll keep my money.

If you plan to carry credit card balances soon, you have bigger problems than your CC rate.

But I see two BIG problems with this scenario if Chase wants to retain cutomers.

1. Hanging up on you is absolutely ridiculous, not once but TWICE. In my opinion, this is the scummiest thing a customer service rep can do, just so they don’t have to deal with your problem. You can’t walk away when a customer is in your face, but these jerks think they can hide behind a phone. I don’t understand how corporations can tolerate this kind of behavior by their reps.

2. You just wanted information, which you got eventually anyway. Was it really that hard to explain to someone why their rate was raised so they can correct the problem if they want? A lack of transparency will just make people more angry at dealing with the CC companies.

All in all, I’m sick of dealing with credit card companies and frankly, will do just fine with debit from this point forward…

Thanks for sharing this story! :)

1) Is it your oldest card by a significant amount of time? Because how old your oldest card is affects your credit score, though apparently 10 years is still not old enough to win you brownie points with FICO, grr. I think you left a comment on my blog when I bitched about this a few months ago.

2) You probably know this, but CCs are considering charging an annual fee again, targeted at those of us who don’t carry a balance. So keep your eyes peeled for those notifications.