PNC, formerly National City, sent us a letter this week that they are raising our interest rate on our credit card. The reason for our rate being raised included this reason:
“Limited relationship with National City/PNC Bank”
PNC is now owner of National City (where we originally had our card). I was wary of PNC taking over our account because we banked with them previously and their fees were brutal and their service was awful.
We’ve been with National City for over 6 years. First with a home equity loan for our previous home, and with this credit account that we have had for the same 6 years. I think 6 years is a long time, but apparently they do not.
This is the 3rd time that a credit card company has raised our rates in the last 6 months. Both other times I fought back and won. I detailed my experience with Chase raising our rates, and then reinstating them, and then reducing our credit limit.
Why not just pay it off? We are working on paying off our credit card debt. Our goal is to be free of all our debt (that isn’t our home) in December 2011. This card is not at the top of our list on our debt snowball, but it may have to move up.
It seems every time we take a step forward, we get penalized by credit card companies. Higher minimum payments, higher interest rates, and lowered limits. It’s enough to make me want to forgo credit cards for good. Like Matt from Debt Free Adevnture, I’m considering using Lending Club (a peer to peer lending organization) for a credit card consolidation loan to pay off our cards once and for all.
Stay tuned, I’ll let you know if I have success with PNC.
Kelly
photo credit: daveynin
NOTE: Submissions and comments must be made at The Credit Card Chaser site to win.
Do you love your credit card? Do you hate it? Tell Credit Card Chaser why, and you could win a $500 AMEX gift card!
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This is my entry so I’ll tell you why I hate my Chase card. You may already know that I HATE Chase Cards.
First they tried to jack up our interest rate, so I fought back, and won! Then they cut our credit limit by exactly what we had paid off so our utilization went to nearly 90% of our limit!
Recently they sent us ANOTHER note saying our interest rate was going up again. Thankfully we are locked in at a low rate while we pay it off. (note: this is not the highest interest rate card we have so that is why we are still paying it off, it’s #3 right now)
Another thing I hate about Chase? We had another account with them (since paid off! WOOT!), but it STILL shows up on my list of accounts online. What’s worse, they changed the account number right before we closed it so we have TWO accounts listed, and BOTH are listed as having $1 balances even though I’ve confirmed that the account is closed and we owe nothing.
I look forward to paying off my Chase card completely so I NEVER have to deal with their crappy service again!
You can enter the contest too! You don’t even need a blog.
The rules
Tell Credit Card Chaser why you LOVE a particular credit card or credit card company/bank. NOTE: If you do not use a credit card then feel free to make your story about a debit card instead. OR Tell Credit Card Chaser why you HATE a particular credit card or credit card company/bank (i.e. “I hate Chase because they jacked up my interest rate and decreased my credit limit even though I have never made a late payment”). <—They said that not me! But it’s true!
There are two ways to submit your entry and two different prize levels:
A) Submit your entry by writing a blog post about this contest and telling your LOVE/HATE story to have a chance at winning a $500 American Express gift card
B) Leave a comment on the site telling your LOVE/HATE story to have a chance at winning a $100 American Express gift card.
Good luck!
Kelly
photo credit: Dennis Wong
I wrote about Chase Bank and how much they suck.
When I posted about it on twitter, I got some great responses from other personal finance bloggers. Many had their own stories of how their banks suck.
I’m starting a series, and encourage you to share your own story of bank suckage.
You can write about your experience in the comments, or email me with your story.
Today’s post comes from Paul at Fiscal Geek. You can read all about how much Paul loves Wells Fargo here.
Do you have a bank you won’t do business with? What was your bad experience? A credit card nightmare, a mortgage fiasco, or fees that added up for no apparent reason? Share your story with me in the comments.
Kelly
This is a guest post from FiscalGeek and part of my series on Banks That Suck.
I have to state that my hatred mostly flows from my dealings with Wells Fargo Home Mortgage but that expands into their consumer banking business as a matter of course.
I have gone through one painful refinance with them 2 years ago and one current failed refi that I’m still dealing with.
Our first refinance I had the displeasure to work with a broker who couldn’t get the physical address of our home straight. She first sent preliminary documents to my wife’s place of work which happens to be a city government. As such they open all mail and classify it appropriately, and this ended up being a big debacle as she’s not supposed to get anything of a personal nature at work. Even better that they saw all of our financials laid out on the front page. That was remedied and when we went to sign the loan papers we had to correct each page manually because she had listed our neighbors address in the loan documents. Classic.
Re-finance attempt 2 is still in a giant train wreck 5 months after initiating the process. To sum up a rather long and painful story we were using the Making Home Affordable Program, Wells Fargo didn’t know how to use it and strung us along for 3 months without any real information. I was told repeatedly told that it would close the next week, yada yada and nothing. After 3 months they stated, oh we didn’t get the rate locked in but we can go ahead and refinance with this new rate that is a full percentage point higher and you’ll need to bring $2500 to the closing of your own money.
I of course told them to pound sand. They took an initial $500 for an appraisal they never ordered and I’m still escalating and escalating to get my money back. I’m seconds away from calling our local news agency to highlight this story. I’m beyond frustrated and I’m in the process of moving all of our business from Wells Fargo although I’m probably stuck with my mortgage for the time being. You’ve been warned.
Kelly responds:
We had our home mortgage with Wells Fargo previously, and they did indeed suck. We paid for an appraisal that did happen but came in $10K lower than the bank rep suggested our house was worth. That meant the deal was off, and they couldn’t offer us a product that saved us any money. When rates dropped further (down to 5%) we opted to refinance with our local credit union, FMFCU. There were no big hiccups, and the mortgage rep was awesome. We’re saving $300+ a month, and have better customer service. Hopefully Paul can find another option to refinance!
