Punished By One Credit Card for Being Late on Another?
Has this ever happened to you? I don’t think it’s happened to me, but then again, I must confess that I am not one to read the fine print, or heck, even to notice sometimes that my interest rate seems to have indiscriminantly gone up for no reason at all suddenly. Apparently, there is a nice little loophole with credit card companies and how they determine your APR where they can actually jack your interest rate up if they find out you’ve been late on payments to other creditors.
I did know that they could increase the APR you pay them on a revolving basis if you were late with your payments to THEM, but not to other creditors, or that they could run periodic credit checks to see how your credit was faring with other creditors. I’m not sure that makes sense to me, since they should only be concerned of your balance and payment history with them it seems, not with their competition. Or am I not making sense and this seems right?
It’s no secret that many big creditors are really trying to make it harder for people to get credit cards with them by lowering their maximum spending limits, increasing their monthly minimum payments, and scaling back on the once generous introductory periods with no or very little interest and other similar “get ‘em in the door” methods to get people to sign up with them and start using their credit cards like crazy.
This is probably in large part also a response to the mortgage market crisis, and the news I just read the other days paints a picture that things are not really going to get any better any time soon. I’ve already noticed that trying to increase my maximum spending limit on one business credit card was like pulling teeth, whereas before I’d be able to get the increase (it wasn’t anything outrageous) with no problems, and really no questions asked.
This time there was a waiting period and I didn’t reaceive a letter telling me my request to increase was ok until about one month later. That, to me, says that creditors are really being more cautious about who they give money and credit out to, and when and how they increase spending limits.
