Goodwill gesture... from a bank!

[stephbg]

Got a nasty surprise today when the Visa account came in.

I'd been charged interest. I never pay interest! Never ever. It's a horrifying trap, because once you start paying interest you have to pay out the entire account to stop the domino fall.

I always pay the full amount out each month, but this time I'd paid just a fraction later than the processing time limit, which kicked my payment out by one day. This triggered the OMG YOU DIDN'T PAY YOUR BILL and WOOHOO WE CAN START CHARGING YOU INTEREST alarms. Unfortunately I didn't hear these alarms until today, when I received my next account.

It is not easy to get to a human on the ANZ phone system. They're really quite creative in their methods of hiding the "For all other enquiries..." and "To talk to a customer service representative..." options, but I got there in the end. Not much of a wait on hold (probably because no-one else could get through the menu system), and then explanations, followed by another transfer, but again no hold time. More explanations. Nice lady.

They agreed to reverse the charge and more importantly stop making *more* charges, which was nice, and I agreed to pay out the whole account immediately (i.e. sacrifice my interest-free period) just to make sure that the interest dragon was slain.

So a short sharp fright in the administrivia department, settled quickly. But I do hate letters that make your heart race even temporarily.

Comments

[kremmen.livejournal.com]

If you always pay it on time, why not just have it sucked from your bank account automatically and then it can never be late?

[stephbg.livejournal.com]

I'm a control freak? I use the credit card for as much as possible, so I like to keep an eye on it. It would be easy to miss fraud if I didn't have to look at each statement.

[kremmen.livejournal.com]

I'd never thought of that. Not checking statements isn't something I'd considered at all, even though I've had all of my Australian cards on autopay since sometime last century.

[jennyblackford.livejournal.com]

I just realised that my reply is exactly like yours, but in more words. Sorry!

[kremmen.livejournal.com]

That's amusing. My version vs verbose author version.
:)

[jennyblackford.livejournal.com]

Even if you have your credit card bill paid automatically (which I heartily recommend), you still get the statements to check well before the payment is processed, and can ring up about any dubious transactions. Best of both worlds. I've been doing it (autopay AND checking through every statement) for decades - ever since I started travelling so much with work that I was likely to miss paying bills otherwise. I've had dubious transactions in that time, and dealt with them without major dramas. Autopay made no difference to that at all.