The Chase Continues
The ongoing saga regarding Chase Bank credit cards. I recently wrote Chasing Them Away, where I describe my (and my wife’s) continuing frustration with the Chase. Last week an offer that couldn’t be refused. The aforementioned bank sent her a decent balance transfer offer. Having yet another card with a higher interest rate that we wanted to close (don’t get me started on how many we have or how much is on them ;)) my wife took them up on the transfer. She was able to get a decent sized credit line, but not enough to transfer the entire balance over. Soon after getting the information from the bank she called. She managed to get Chase Bank to move a credit line from the atrociously high 30 something percent to the lower rate card - well all but 500.00. So she has the same credit available between the two cards, just the bank moved the available credit from one account to the other. I didn’t even know this could be done.
To recap: Chase refused to let her talk to a supervisor due to something in a three year old credit report and left her at the default rate. We moved the balance away from Chase, keeping the account open - but unused, zero balance - for a short time to improve the balance to available credit ratio (an important measurement). Chase sent a new balance transfer offer, for a new account. My wife applied for and received a card that she transferred an old balance (shared by the ex-spouse) to. She then called Chase and gave them a “what’s up with this 30% interest?” kind of argument - I mean if she can open a much lower rate with the same company why can’t they lower the rate on the higher card? The response was that they couldn’t change the terms of the higher rate card (I’ll call it A) but they could move the available credit to the better card(B).
Did you follow all of that? I’m not even sure that I did. But the point is to call your creditors. They will (sometimes) work with you. You have no idea what can be accomplished just by asking. Sometimes nothing, sometimes it’s something that is amazingly startling.
