Sometimes It Works
February 27th, 2009. Filed under: Finance & Fitness Fridays.If you have a credit card, you’ve probably received a notice telling you that your interest rate is going up. I did. Mine was doubling. I’ve had this Capital One account for years, make payments on time and am in good standing with the company. It’s still irritating that we, the taxpayers, have given the banks bailout money and more to come, while they have done nothing to help us out. I didn’t expect them to go around lowering interest rates, but I certainly didn’t expect to see mine double.
So I called, politely voiced my concerns and asked if anything could be done about it. They threw me a bone. It’s not exactly as much as I expected, but hey, it certainly beats what was happening. They will leave my interest rate as it is for four more months before raising it. When they do, they will raise it only 6% instead of 8%. Now if I could only dump it all before the increase, but will not be able to do that.
I thought I had the taxes figured out so that I wouldn’t owe this year. Ha! Due to some unforeseen circumstances, I’m going to owe. A bunch. I’m working on getting that together now and then I’ll only have a couple months to get as much as possible paid on the card balance before the interest jumps. I’ll do what I can and then explore some other options when that time arrives.
So, you never know. Sometimes it works. Try calling your credit card companies. Every little bit helps.