Got a Chase credit card? Check your bill to see if the due date shrunk. For the past ten months, the due date on reader NDphoxylady’s four Chase credit card due date was the fifteenth. Then, without warning or notice, it became the tenth. NDphoxylady only noticed when she was charged a $39 late fee and a $20 finance charge. When she complained to Chase, they told her that simply changing the due date on the bill was adequate notice. Nu-uh
Both NDphoxylady and I know that that doesn’t count. The credit card company needs to send you an additional kind of disclosure notice. She has paperless billing, which may explain why she never got it. In any event, that still doesn’t excuse their non-notification. Three times she called Chase. She asked for supervisors each time and was directed to voicemail, which she never got a call back from. We told NDphoxylady it was time to escalate to executive customer service and pointed her to the Chase numbers on our site. Within a few minutes of calling, Chase waived the fee. NDphoxylady was happy about that, but still pissed that it happened in the first place.
She wrote, “Now, we pay everything on the 12th, and I do not have the time to check every month that my due date is going to change…I feel like closing my account with them.
I mean to me it’s the principle that matters, they could have charged me three bucks and I would still be pissed off. It’s their manipulative behavior, and I doubt many people called to get these fees removed. They probably thought it was their fault and never reported it to chase
Is anyone trying to control these companies? I mean can’t government regulate something?”
We told her if that she really feels strongly about it, to write a letter to her elected representatives. This excellent post shows you the most effective way to write to Congress.
“Who will protect the customers,” NDphoxylady asked. ” It’s like we have to stick up for ourselves and for other people.”
It’s always a good idea to scrutinize your monthly bills. You never know when they’re going to try to sneak in a new fee.
(Photo: Getty)
More From Consumerist
-
New Chase Devices In Stores Will Accept Payments From Mobile Phones
-
Chase Ordered To Pay $100M To Credit Card Customers For Boosting Minimum Payments
-
Shrink Ray Zaps Aussie Shampoos, Somehow Makes Them Look Bigger
-
Chase Won’t Stop Robocalling About My Low Account Balance: I Don’t Have An Account
-
Jennie-O Reverses Grocery Shrink Ray To Add 10% More Fat Back In To Turkey Franks
@AlphaWolf: The problem is, where is this “elsewhere?” Capital One, Bank of America, Citibank, Chase, … it’s an industry standard.
Don’t even bother mentioning USAA. Hardly anyone qualifies.
You want to know another dirty trick banks use to throw their credit card customers of, besides playing with due dates? They change payment remittance addresses. I can’t tell you how many times they do that, which will delay payment processing (even if you do it electronically). In fact, they seem to engineer that specifically for electronic bill payers (because if you pay by check and use their payment coupon, it will have the address pre-printed on it).
So I am always checking due dates and remittance addresses pretty much every time I do my electronic payments.
And I have to say, the time period from when you actually get the bill (electronically or in the mail) and when payment is due is truly shrinking. Sometimes, I see two weeks or less.
So, the rule is use some sort of personal finance software to organize payments, check your card account online frequently, rely less and less on them to TELL you when payment is due.
Stay ahead of these sharks.
@Doofio:
I didn’t receive monthly paper bills. There was no prominent notification on the online bill paying system (which I used to make my “late” payments the same time I did every month)…there might have been somewhere on the web site, but I had no way of knowing where to look OR THAT I NEEDED TO LOOK.
I found out that this was happening when I read my online bill and saw charges that shouldn’t have been there. But by then it was already happening.
I received no other notification.
Chase did the same thing to me. They told me over the phone when I set up my new Freedom card that the bills would be due on the 21st.
Since then the date suddenly became the 16th. AND I do NOT have paperless billing and I NEVER received a notice of this change!
I pay my entire bill online throughout the month, but this is really sneaky. Shame on the idiots who blame the OP for not looking at the statement. Chase should be blamed for its trickery! Why is it perfectly fine for businesses to try and screw a customer? Sure, it might be LEGAL, but it is still something that should be condemned rather than justified by so many commenting lemmings. I didn’t realize that so many Chase employees read the Consumerist.
So, can somebody please explain to me the mentality that it’s OK for a corporation to screw you unless you catch them at it?
I made a rather sizable payment on my BoA card on June 3rd, even though the online system said that I had no payment due. For giggles, I checked my account on the 20th and it said I had a payment due on the 23rd. Thank goodness I bothered to look, or I would have been late.
How can I not owe money on the 3rd, pay money on the 3rd, and owe money on the 23rd? Is that what passes for a month these days?
@BeFrugalNotCheap: That’s not what I meant at all. What I meant was I’m baffled by the fact that people are continually shocked when CC companies pull shit like this. I worked for the company in question (until I was laid off, yay!), and I’ve seen them do stuff that makes this particular issue look wonderful in comparison. They’re credit card companies. I don’t believe in Satan but your average CC company CEO comes pretty damned close. It’s like being shocked that Nike sneakers are made by five year olds in Indonesian sweatshops or that Santa Claus isn’t real.
The ONLY way to co-exist with them is to beat them at their own game, or get by without credit. Because the government sure as fuck won’t do anything to curb their excesses, all you need to do is look at the bankruptcy legislation championed by Joe Biden (D-MBNA) passed a few years ago to see it, and I say that as a Democrat.
@KarmaChameleon: And I’ll add that it’s really fucking sad that you have to approach doing business with a company like that, but in this day and age, that’s just how it is.
I get paperless statements for my credit card, so I see the point of not necessarily being willing/able to check each statement – especially with automatic electronic payment. I guess I’m lucky, because my bank (Wells Fargo) sends me an email that a change has been made to the T’s & C’s, which is how they offset the “forgot to look at my statement” claim.
Would it be better/easier if one had to negotiate the terms of credit individually with a bank and draw up a contract? Or are these ‘standardized’ agreements better? Just wondering.
@humphrmi: They would have to rely on Chase sending a separate notice, which the OP says she never received.
Chase sends me those notices electronically too, included with the electronic bill. So if you’re not opening the electronic bill, you’re not going to see the electronic notice. (I don’t recall if they sent me a printed notice as well.) And after logging in, I pass the due date on the way to accessing statements and enclosures.
I hope she gets a credit. Meanwhile, the rest of us can avoid falling into this trap by glancing at bills when they arrive.
@KarmaChameleon:
No one is forcing anyone to co-exist with credit card companies. Credit cards are a luxury/convenience that most people abuse anyway. You might be making a pact with the devil by getting and using a credit card, but it was a pact you made on your own free will. The Government does NOT need to step in an protect people from themselves and their credit cards.
@Xerloq: Would it be better/easier if one had to negotiate the terms of credit individually with a bank and draw up a contract? Or are these ‘standardized’ agreements better? Just wondering.
It’d be easier if the one party in the agreement didn’t have the ability to change the terms on a whim. Maybe that’s just the inherent evil in a revolving line of credit.
@Pylon83: No one is forcing anyone to co-exist with credit card companies. Credit cards are a luxury/convenience that most people abuse anyway.
Correct. We recently learned that there is, in fact, at least one prominent individual who lives without a credit cards. I imagine there are more. I just can’t picture Warren Buffet pulling out his Amazon.com Visa.
To all the people blaming the OP and complaining about people being lazy and/or irresponsible for not checking their bill each month, if you use something like Quicken, it does check your items and reconcile your statement. However, it isn’t yet advanced enough to make sure they don’t try and screw you over. Also, when banks actively push things like e-billing and automatic payments, how is it the customers fault when they then use this platform of regularity to essentially trick people.
Sad to hear so many bad stories about Chase. They bought out a couple banks that I had cards with, so now they are my CC provider. So far haven’t had any issues they haven’t resolved reasonably. Except – in TEN months they couldn’t give my kid a simple “yes or no” for his first credit card. Seems they have some pretty incompetent people and/or processes there.
Now I’ll be watching them much closer. They already dropped back the grace period to 20 days, and with the mailing delays you basically get 5-6 days to get the money to whichever state they want to process payments in this month. Reading the crap happening to other people here will make me pull the trigger and leave if I ever get caught in their “gotcha!” web even once. Backhanded “penalty fees” aren’t any way to build a long-term business relationship with me, and probably every other smart person here.
@acasto: There’s the rub. When “banks” start acting like two-bit street hustlers preying on your good nature, that’s when I get angry and leave ‘em for good. If Chase pulls something like this on me and ding me, I’m gone and will pay cash the rest of my life rather than go back to them if they were the last thieving “bank” on earth.
Discover just did this to me last month as well. My bill has been due on the 5th for the entire time I’ve had this particular card (a gas rebate card)….which is several years of payments. I logged on to the website on the 3rd to pay, only to find the due date had been moved to the first. I called immediately, and the CSR said they were just changing the way the billing read, so that it was ‘due’ on the first but not ‘overdue’ until the 5th (okay, kind of like my mortgage payment, I can live with that). He assured me my payment was not overdue and nothing bad was going to happen.
So I get this month’s bill–with an over due fee. I call again, and to Discover’s credit they did remove the fee immediately. I’m still kind of irritated. Discover may not have the best rewards, but they have never jerked me around with the payment thing, so I’ve stuck with them. If this happens again, though…..grrr.
Folks, it’s a free market. Get another credit card, preferably with a credit union or a smaller bank where the people are probably more compassionate and responsive to customers. Or better yet, pay off your stupid credit card balance and really stick it to loan sharks like Chase.
No, it’s not a “free market”. And switching to a different bank after they cheat you doesn’t erase the fact that they cheated you.
On credit cards, I hope none of you “only idiots used credit cards” people are not the same ones, on threads where an OP used a debit card, squawking about what an idiot the OP is and how he should have used a CC for the transaction.
@Cool Cat: It ain’t no “free market” when a small group of megabanks are allowed to swallow up what were previously thought of as megabanks and then pull this sort of stuff. Deregulation and consolidation results in the few oligopolists pulling this sort of shit more and more. And when they pay off our politicians, only more evil entrenched in law will ensue.
@satoru: I agree with your super nerd approach. More than once having a paper statement has saved me.
We have Chase, and long ago I got used to the due date moving around. About 7 years ago there was a due date that really would have put us in a bind. I figured it out in enough time to call them several days before the payment was due and got them to let me change the due date. The CSR must have understood how the collision with our mortgage payment just wasn’t a good thing.
I’ve never asked since, and watch this account carefully. We are lucky if we get the paper statement a week before the due date. I’m not sure where they mail out of. There have been a couple months recently where I’ve checked the charges by phone and had to pay the bill almost on faith, otherwise it would have been late.
While we are griping, how about how when you pay by phone, the cutoff from “today” to “tomorrow” is so early, especially during daylight saving months. Amex doesn’t make a point of the daily cutoff; when you pay, your payment is noted immediately.
If they refuse to remove the late fee and interest, tell them you will keep this account open and never use it again. Remind them it costs them ~$75 per year to keep your account open.
Well, this isn’t limited to Chase, and I’m surprised that Consumerist isn’t aware of this! (Actually, I just checked, and you are)
The CC companies are not only known for changing dates with no notice (or, at least, notice that they know full well their customers will likely not see) they’ve got all sorts of other tactics to rake up the fees. Bill is due by 10 am. Mail gets delivered after that? Your fault. Fee. You live in MA? The, by jove, your payments need to be mailed to CA or Washington. But if you live in Portland, your payment center is more likely NJ or Delaware, so they can maximize time on the road (and the likelihood that the payment won’t get there on time.)
BoA does the same exact crap.
All the banks are doing this.
Call your congressman/woman and ream them out for not representing your interests!
This practice is sleazy.
All CC companies are rip offs. I dont even have a credit card. I realized long ago its stupid a pointless to use them. I pay cash and never worry about it. If you dont like carrying cash use a bank check card. CC companies are designed to swindle you out of your money. Then when you ‘screw up’ by not paying them after they fool with due dtes etc, they screw your FICA score.
Yet, when they fuck up you have no one to go to. It not a fair buisness transaction.
@BeFrugalNotCheap: And when you’re out of a job because Chase has ran off all of it’s private customers, guess what? That’s right asshole, too bad!
The problem isn’t that Chase didn’t “notify” the customer; it’s that they made a change without making it obvious (much like the shrink-ray).
Yes I read my bill, but I don’t pay attention to the due date primarily because it has been the same now for 5-6 years!
I’ll have to start looking to make sure this doesn’t change.
“Boo-hoo, can’t the government save me?”
Government is a disease masquerading as its own cure.
Learn to take care of yourself instead of expecting the government to help you. Compare the different responses to flooding from the people in Iowa to those in New Orleans.
Wait, it’ll get even BETTER. Next month, she’ll get a bill with interest charged on it again. Ya see, The scumbags at Chase employ the fun 2-cycle billing gimmick. The clowns tried this on me, that’s why I cancelled the card. Isn’t it nice that the powerless Congress can hold hearings, and the scumbag corporate banks can just do as they please, and not even be embarrassed by it?
My rule is simple:
I pay my bill 24hrs after the closing date. That’s the same day the statement becomes available online.
That’s MY due date.
Chase and friends can f*** with the due dates all they want. If they aren’t giving at least 72hrs, I’ll go to the Attorney Generals office.
Works out the same to me, since each interval is still a month. By the time the bill actually arrives by mail (normally a week later I might add), it’s already been paid and reflected in my account online.
Not sure why others don’t due the same.
@freejazz38: They stopped doing that, at least for me. I’m pretty sure they agreed to eliminate that practice when the government pressured them.
I have a car loan with Chase (because they offered the best interest rate).
I do not know it this is a similar thing, but the first year of the loan I recieved a year’s worth of payment stubs that I had to pay by the 15th of each month. The next year it changed, now i recieve a bill at the beginning of the month (varies) and have to pay by the 11th. Sometimes I get only 3 days to pay the bill. I have never been late on a payment but I feel they are trying their hardest to make me late.
* they are
There seems to be a lot of argument about who is at fault here, but regardless of whether this problem could have been avoided by the consumer, it still seems shady on the part of chase.
What could possibly be the point of changing due dates? It seems like an attempt to proactively create late fees to me. I don’t care what the laws are, that is not ethical and certainly not good customer service.
Some people think it is ridiculous to suggest that a company would do this, but I have had enough unjustified or erroneous fees show up in my bills to feel confident that some of them are there on purpose, in the hopes that I will be too lazy to fix them or too busy to notice. The customer should not have to constantly be watching out for every company they do business with attempting to screw them. I think what Chase did in this case in unacceptable.
@simplekismet: I’ve signed up for these too. I get an email when my new statement is available, and another one 10 days before my payment is due. It’s really, really helpful and I would urge others to sign up for these alerts as well.
This didn’t occur on my Chase card and I receive electronic only statements. I’ve had my Chase card for about a year and they’ve been nothing but awesome.
First National Bank caught me in the same trap depicted here in this story. I had online auto-payment set up from my bank to pay my low interest credit card bill every month on the same date. They kept moving the date up on me and I ended up being late on a payment. They then tried to increase my percentage rate to their maximum. I called First National and they said “just this one time” they would forgo the interest rate hike.
Banks are nothing but crooks. Yes, we need regulation of the credit card companies.
Makes me think about letting go of the strongholds of Chase. At least I finally got them to stop sending me all their “promotions” to my mailbox (thanks to the Consumerist).
Technically speaking, the “due date drift” may be because of how the cardmember contract is written. I noticed one of my cards had been moving around also, and looked closely on one of the contracts, and it clearly said that billing periods were in 30-day increments.
Meaning that the due date will constantly move ‘forward’ due to months having uneven numbers of days. Over the course of a non-leap year, my due date will move ‘up’ about 4 days, if I’m counting right (7 months have 31, 4 have 30, 1 has 28 –> 7 – 3 = 4?).
Just something to be aware of; it may be a billing issue related to the calendar, not some insidious plan to screw everyone with fees. Some CC companies just have shitty billing systems.
Easy fix to this problem:
I get paid every two weeks. Although I generally use one of my paychecks each month to pay off my credit card, I use online bill pay and always make the minimum payment out of the other paycheck too. So the bank’s getting at least the minimum payment every two weeks.
There’s no way for me to ever have a late payment. I don’t even look at the due dates.
I had a due date change get me as well.
My statement date was the 15th, and I was heading out of town so a couple weeks in advance I set up an online payment (thru my bank). The payment would have been enough to cover the bill and a bit more, but they pushed the date out a week (out!) to the 22nd. So for that cycle it looked like I made two payments, which I did, but then missed that I actually paid the bill before the statement was even cut. I must say, I called, and the customer service person laughed, she said “I understand exactly what happened” and backed out the fee along with the interest. She said she saw I had years of paid in full on the same date, and offered some odd reason the date got shifted.
Joe
@BeFrugalNotCheap:
It’s collection agents like you that lost Chase my business. Seems they like to hire like minded individuals.
I had to attend an out of state funeral last year and in my zeal to get out of town I forgot to pay 2 of my CC bills. One was my CC card and the other was my Newegg.com account.
When I got back into town a week later I got a phone call from Newegg.com (Bill me later) and I explained the situation and she was very polite and I apologized for missing the payment and she set me up with an automatic payment on my next pay period. I ate the late fee since it was my fault but she treated me great!
Chase was a completely different story. First, I owed double on the Newegg card than I did on the CC card and 2nd of my total balance on the CC card, only $100 was revolving. The remainder was no payments/interest till June ’08. This person called me on my cellphone and when I answered they hung up and then called on my work phone. Again, they hung up and called back a 3rd time.
By this time I’m already none to happy but whatever, I was late and they were owed their money. I went thru the same spiel with the Chase agent and she went on a tirade about how horrible I was and that I was a dirtbag for not paying my bill on time and that if I was a decent responsible person…blah blah blah….
I was floored. I admitted I was wrong and even told them I would pay the same day I was paying Newegg. She said she’d note the account and hung up.
But the story doesn’t end there, the next week I get a call. This is 2 days before I was to make the payment from another Chase agent, bitching me out because I hadn’t made payment. I explained what had transpired the week before and my promise to pay and she told me I was lying because Chase doesn’t take promises to pay more than 4 days out.
Needless to say I cancelled the card and paid it off as soon as I could. I can understand an agent getting a bit pissy if the customer acts an ass or what not but I freely admitted it was my fault and that I would pay the charges incurred.
Lesson Learned: Chase is a terrible company to do business with and they will never see any more of my money.
I pay off my CC bill every month. I collect my bills throughout the week and pay them every Sunday night. Once I got my bill on Thursday, on Sunday when I went to pay the bill I noticed the due date was Wednesday! Now, why the heck should I have to write out a check the EXACT MINUTE I get my bill in order to not be late? I understand that there can be times when your due date changes because of how many days are in the month, but for criminy sakes, 7 day turnaround?
I can’t stand Chase. I had a regular Chase card, then later got a Circuit City Chase card. After I changed bank accounts and updated my payment information for the Circuit City card, the payments would no longer go through. That happened three months in a row, and I called them 3 or 4 times asking what to do. I was told to double check the accuracy of my bank info and to resubmit payment.
This never worked, despite trying several times. I wasn’t assessed late fees because their records showed I had submitted payments ontime, even though they didn’t go through. I called again after the next payment was rejected and was assured that my account would continue to be in good standing if I went to the store and made a payment through the service desk. I did so the same day.
Three days later I got a letter in the mail stating that my account had been closed on lack of payment. Then my other Chase account was closed because of the Circuit City account closing. That made my credit score drop about 150 points because all of the sudden I had about $15,000 less in available credit and two recently closed accounts. And all the while I had been staying in contact with their service reps about the issue and following their advice. Oh well, lesson learned and one less weasel of a company in my life.
@johnva: You are correct that Chase stopped using two-cycle billing in 2007 (their official corporate line: “customers didn’t understand it”). Discover recently started phasing it out as well, too, as did National City.
Still, the practice hasn’t gone away completely: WaMu still uses two-cycle billing for credit cards.
They not only made one of my cards’ due dates earlier by 4 days, they didn’t send me either of my bills this month. Fortunately, I frequently check online to make sure they can’t catch me like this. Assholes!
@toddvm: Only in response to your comment about needing regulation of the CC industry – banks are one of the most heavily regulated industries in the country, from multiple federal and state agencies. Why do you think there is so much legal paperwork that comes with every one of your accounts?
@Michael Belisle: Yes, because if I tell you “Trash pickup comes every month on the 30th”, and the only indication it’s moving is the website (no mail, no phone call) and it suddenly comes by on the 25th, you’re going to be perfectly fine with that.
This is just a minor example, but some people have better things to do than check their billing every day to make sure the dates aren’t magically moving around. It’s just common fucking courtesy.
But it seriously seems like commenters on the Consumerist are just bending over and let themselves get raped by these kinds of policies. Yes, it’s all my fault I wasn’t checking the due date every day, feel free to charge me $tons!
I hate this site’s commenters.
I was a satisfied customer of Washington-Mutual Bank — that was taken over by Chase Bank.
I, too, have been victimized by the “shrunken” due date — and penalized a “Late Fee”! When Chase took over, I had been assured that everything would “be the same” as with Washington-Mutual. I was never notified of any change and this needs to be corrected for all — if it means a class action suit!