$49 for going over the limit by less than $30??

so i have this credit card with a measly $500 limit. hadn't been using it so they knocked it down to next to nothing.
the send me a 1.9% balance transfer offer. even with fees, this is less than i'm borrowing elsewhere, so i max it out to pay down my more expensive debt.

so far, so good.

on the way home from work mrs. unblock calls me and asks me to pick up something for $30. this rarely happens, and before i have time to think i've put it on the same card, putting me over the limit.

i realize this when i get home and put my receipt into quicken. oops. i'm ordinarily EXTREMELY careful and anal about my finances, i think i might have going over the limit one other time in my entire life. i guess it can happen to anyone.

anyway, so i figure i'd try to pay it online before the charge hits. no such luck, the balance is zero because neither the balance transfer nor the $30 charge has hit yet. so i call up the credit card company.

in order to protect the not-so-innocent, i'll call them "shitibank".

well it turns out that the over limit fee is $49 and there's nothing they can do about it. i can pay over the phone, for which there's a $15 privilege. that's right, THEIR software is broken and can't accept payment but over the phone they can, for a big extra fee that they wouldn't "have to" charge if their software accepted it. moreover, they couldn't tell me for sure if paying the $30 today would get me out of the over limit fee.

so i call the merchant instead and they were very nice about it, they let me cancel the transaction and put it on a different card over the phone, and hey! they didn't even charge me $15 for the service!

so, yes, i fully admit that i screwed up and shouldn't have gone over the limit. but shitibank tried to take advantage of my mistake by charging me an INSANE amount of money that IN NO WAY is justified by any extra risk involved. frankly there's no excuse to ever charge more than the over limit amount as a fee because then you're more than completely covered for the extra risk. this is a "gotcha" fee if ever there was one.

nevermind that the overwhelming majority of card users would no doubt prefer that they get a decline from the merchant instead of a $49 fee from shitibank.

so the bottom line is, i'm squared away, no fees, no problem, the merchant is squared away, and shitibank is out the merchant fee for the $30 transaction. HAH!

knowing I'd be on the road.

I told them it was up to them, they could do something about that $29 fine for $30 bill OR I could cut my card in half.

They did something about the fine.

I've never had a problem with Citibank, but I have a Chase credit card I call annually about to have them remove the annual fee & I sometimes have to go up several layers. This last time, they suggested I switch to a different card that doesn't have annual fee. But they waived the fee so I haven't. We'll see next year when the fee gets tacked on. I call and say "I want my annual fee waived. If you can't, bump me up to your supervisor". This year, person at 2nd level said there was no supervisor. So, I called back a few days later, went up 2 supervisors, and got the fee waived. Then I wrote a letter complaining about the "no supervisor" guy (I always get their names).

from which i got disconnected. that sort of thing happens WAY too often to be accidental. either the reps want to lose you, want to prevent you from reaching their supervisor, or the call center as a whole wants the experience to be painful so you won't call back asking them to waive fees and such.

it's amazing what call center people do these days. one time, when mrs. unblock was on with a csr (on speaker so i could hear), the csr said "she hung up on me" and hung up on mrs. unblock right while mrs. unblock was saying "i'm still here!"

and i know exactly why they do that sort of thing, they want to drop your call but they know that each month the supervisor reviews a few of their calls, so they do something to give themselves an excuse to hang up on you. in this case, the excuse would be something like, uh, i thought i heard a click, it sounded like they hung up.


anyway, i have no cards with annual fees, but if you believe what they're saying these days, annual fees will be coming back with a vengeance once the new credit card law kicks in....

I've found the number of drops get reduced. And if you do get dropped, you can complain.
Or they put you on hold, thinking you'll hang up. I've put them on speaker phone, and waited 30 minutes. Occasionally they come back, usually not. Then I'll write a complaint.

one of the many reasons she usually has far more success calling call centers than i do....

catch it when they answer, assuming they say it.

"If it weren't for overdraft fees, 45% of banks and credit unions wouldn't have made money in 2008."

http://www.usatoday.com/money/perfi/credit/2009-07-08-banks-overdraft-fees_N.htm

and I haven't had a credit card since then and haven't missed it much. Online retailers could be talked into dividing a charge over a couple of days when I needed to charge something over the daily limit of the ATM card, something I only needed to do twice.

Your best bet is to pay that bastard off. Stuff it in a drawer if you need to have the assurance you can borrow expensive money quickly, but leave it there except for one charge a year which you pay off that month.

Credit cards really are evil. Debt is poison. Best to avoid them if you can.

all my balances are at cheap cheap balance transfer rates so it's a good deal for me, as long as i'm on top of things, which as i said i always am (thanks in large part to using quicken religiously) with this one exception.

otherwise, i charge things on clean cards and pay them off each month.

i'm not allergic to debt in and of itself, but there has to be assets to compensate. in my case i have house and retirement savings to compensate, though i am not comfortable because these assets are illiquid and my debt it not. the mismatch is bad enough. debt without assets is just nuts, something to avoid unless there's absolutely no alternative.

:)

:shrug:

I think I need to give these bastids my tax dollars like a battered spouse needs to return to the abuser.

Bail US out, not them Obama -and the corporate Dems ya rode in on!

Glad ya got the situation resolved OP.