I'm sorry, but this is sneaky how? It was spelled out on the first page in 12pt letters.

Not helping will be the change to a variable APR (plus their (bloated) margin).Some folks could end up going way backwards in their quest to get out from under their debt. Another reason to avoid Chase altogether and go find a credit union or other card provider that isn't bent on rape and pillage.

BTW- I have a high energy ray gun locked and loaded for the first poster that blames the OP for carrying this card.

Im already gone from ChaMu (think shamu) after they decided to end all the secured credit cards. notifying me in a letter that was mailed to a quite old address and doing it less than two weeks before they closed the card.

this in turns killing my oldest active acct and avail credit line. there goes the credit score I was trying to rebuild.

I don't see Chase being sneaky at all here. I have a card with WaMu/Chase and not only did I get the letter, I got an e-mail alerting me to this and one of the tellers at the branch I bank at told me about it. How is that being sneaky or underhanded?

@Luke Wilson: It's sneaky because there is absolutely NO reason for them to do this other than to trick people who might not read these notices or check their account frequently. It might be a few months before someone may notice that their account hasn't been being paid in full, or at the higher amount they wanted paid per month.

@renegadebarista: It's underhanded because there is absolutely no reason for them to do this, other than hoping that a lot of people won't notice, or won't change the amount paid for a few months. Think about how much money they will make in interest payments if people even forget about this for a single month.

@renegadebarista: The reasoning behind it is what's sneaky. They're hoping that people will not make extra payments, pay off the card, what have you. Keep in mind that minimum payments can be as low as $10 on a several hundred dollar balance. That means years to pay off a $500 balance, and thusly years' worth in interest. It's a ploy to make money, they're going to be preying on those who don't know any better.

Also, it's pretty sneaky that they're to pass this off as part of the bank merger process. It's not, they're just adding it, like those little paragraphs that get thrown into Congressional bills.

I think the OP should take responsibil-> Ouch!!

Ok, I won't blame the OP . . . . .

@Luke Wilson:
It's sneaky since it's a positively shit thing to do. Also, before I read the consumerist, I didn't bother to read through the pages and pages of stuff my bank sent me. I know there is a huge section of the population that doesn't do that either. So each person that doesn't pay very close attention to every dollar and transaction on their account will wind up paying hundreds or thousands more.

@renegadebarista: I didn't find it sneaky either.

I got the notice in the mail and when i called to check my balance the rep informed me of it.

I figured it was something to do with moving the credit cards over to a new system.

If not, well... then it's my own fault for not checking my credit card accounts AT LEAST

@idip: SIGH....

AT LEAST ONCE A MONTH. I mean, if i'm going to go 5 months without checking my statements as some of the other posters are saying (or at least saying some poeple do) then how am i supposed to know if i'm a victim of identity theft? or if there are any charges that don't belong on the account.

Everyone assumes Chase is doing this maliciously... is there any proof that points to that theory? Or have we all just become paranoid anti-corporation (anti-capitalism can one go as far as saying socialist) citizens?

I love the part where they say they can change any part of the "agreement".

@Luke Wilson:

As of 2 years ago, Chase was not sending notifications of changes such as this one to people who had turned off paper statements.

(I might have thought it was a mistake if not for the fact that they made another change the next month after I had just complained about the first change about which I was not informed.)

Chase are evil scumbags. They've done things at least this bad before, and they will continue to do so as long as people put up with it.

It is a profit making scheme pure and simple. They hope to make enough extra dough off of those who don't read notices or are too busy to micro manage their finances so they won't notice the payments changed until months later.
It is just like the grocery shrink ray and skewed unit pricing intended to fleece those not paying attention or too hurried to notice.

It's pure speculation about what their reasoning is.

My bet is that Chase's efforts to integrate the WaMu accounts into the Chase infrastructure screwed around with the payment schedule on the WaMu accounts. Rather then fix them all, they decided to set them to the minimum and let the customers take care of it.

Occam's Razor: No need to choose malicious intent over simply lazy behavior.

@bohemian: Verifying your payment was made is now considered 'micromanaging'?

I'm really concerned now.

If people assume everything is going right with their accounts and don't bother to check their statements ever.

How many double charges are going through? How many scam charges are going through their accounts?

This is a legitimate concern!

I am a Chase card holder. I just checked their website. When scheduling automatic, monthly payments, you can choose from Min Balance and Full Balance. There is no option for a fixed dollar amount. This seems to be the only way they can transfer the automatic payments without surprising someone.

@Luke Wilson: Obviously you're one who has no problem tricking people as long as you can rationalize that the victim is at fault for not reading and understanding your new terms. This is shady tactics and is used all the time by vendors who insist their shady practices are legit because they spell it out in fine print.

Too bad we can't file anti-shady legislation that says vendors can not harm a reasonable consumer with opt-out notices and can not materially change contracts without opt-in permission from the consumer. Because, after all, contracts SHOULD be agreed to by both sides. Almost all vendor contracts are very one sided and they all side with the vendor.

@alanjstr: There is a different option: have your own bank's bill pay send a fixed payment to the credit card company. I do this with Amex. Amex also don't have a way to send in a fixed payment: no problem, my bank can push a payment of anything I want.

@idip:

It's just crystal ball speculation. Frankly, I think these are the sorta people who would bitch no matter what. It may very well be that the automatic payment amounts didn't transfer to the new system easily so it's all just being reset to the minimum. Frankly, I've always thought it was sorta stupid to have these sorta automatic deductions. Take a hour out every month to pay your bills. Hell, it shouldn't even take that long with electronic bill pay. It's always better for you to keep track of these things yourself and to adjust month to month as circumstances change.

@idip: You would be surprised. I was at a work meeting and one of the execs mentioned that he had not bothered to balance his checkbook in over a year. Said he was too busy to look at his bank stuff. There are plenty of people who are lucky if they bother to open their bills in time to pay them.

Go to the grocery store. There are always plenty of tired looking people just dumping things into their cart without looking at them closely. Meanwhile their kids are screaming and hanging off of them or the cart.

Scary thought but those people are out there.

I'm also not looking forward to all the changes coming from Chase. But I thought the WaMu credit card payment website sucked (for those not doing automatic). I think WaMu's website was setup to try to trip people up with selecting the wrong date to pay. How hard was it to have a clickable calendar where it showed me the current date and the due date. Why did I need to use drop down lists that not only did I have to select the right day, but the right month and the right year? I wonder how may people screwed that up and ended up paying late fees. I know I came close to screwing that up a couple of time. I hope Chase's website is better in this regard.

Sounds more like they are trying to resolve the two systems together and just went to the less effort one. Chase could have been truly a scum bag and had it changed to pay full balance and sat back to watch the over draft fees pour in (crap, I hope I didn't give them any ideas). I'll give at least a little credit (very little) for putting it in full size print on the first page and the 4th paragraph too. I also received this letter via e-mail. So at least they're trying to inform people of the changes. But I hope they'd keep more of the features people liked at WaMu.

@alanjstr:

That's what I figured. I think The Consumerist owes Chase an apology for making a baseless and inaccurate accusation of wrongdoing. Perhaps they should do a little fact checking before posting their stories?

The article assumes that the non-minimum payment currently in use will be more than the new payment. That may not be the case, right? Isn't this the result of a merging of 2 different kinds of cards?

What if the minimum payment on the new combined balance was $347 and Joe Customer's automatic payment was $300? Bam, late fee, likely increased interest rate, and surrendering of his first born, etc etc.

I agree this change will likely work in Chase's favor in a lot of cases, but it is really the only way to cover their ass on the "You didn't notify me and my autopay wasn't enough!" scenarios.

Is this only for automatic payments? I always pay my credit card bills manually each month, sometimes even pay 3 different times per month whenever I have extra money. Will I still be able to schedule manual fixed amounts??

Thank god the Consumerist is here to catch things like this. Unfortunately, Consumerist can't catch every single one of these transgressions. For every one exposed credit card scheme, there's probably 20 that goes unnoticed. That's why we have to hammer the ones we do catch.

Spread the word:

[digg.com]

@ken2148: Heh. I thought I was the only one who thought the "Year" dropdown box was shady. Welcome to the club!

If you want to hide then you hide in plain sight. That's what they're doing here, hiding the information right in front of you. When you rip open that envelope or sealed fold-over thing they blast you with tons of information. Not just what you need to know on the first page then details on the next page, not it's just a crap load of info right there in front of you. So you put it down thinking "I'll get to it later after I relax from work". They rely on this behavior, it's not like they have to do anything special to achieve their results, this is how business is done now. Look for more of this behavior as the economy and the rules governing these companies gets tighter.

Um... how is that opting out... they cancel the account!

I suspect that this is a systems integration issue. It sucks, and something material, that is likely to incur charges and interest, should get its own notice.

More likely that they are trying to standardize procedures.

It initially occurred to me that perhaps Chase has always had automatic payments at only the minimum payment due level. Some other comment posters have confirmed this; that Chase card holders could choose automatic payments either to be balance-in-full or minimum-payment.

Given that this is the case, and that WaMu is gone, why is this more than Chase simply trying to integrate the new credit cards into its existing system? It may not be optimal for customers, but since they're not exactly sneaking the change in, is this such a bad thing?

(NB I must admit that on the other hand they don't always integrate everything. Because of the origins of one of my credit cards, that I am paying off a (relatively) low-interest long term balance on, I have noticed occasionally a "bankone" in a URL here or there.)

What bugs me more than this is that the Web site will be down from March 4 to 8. So if you're due between those dates (like me) you better schedule it beforehand. Although to be fair, there is notice of this when you log in. Although if you try to log in the day before you're due and it's down, you're SOL.

And I just saw that e-mail alerts will no longer be available for my account after Feb. 25. Woohoo!

This really isn't a big deal for me. I'm a WaMu cardholder and I've always done what a previous Consumerist article suggested: pay my credit card from both of my biweekly paychecks. I do it manually so I can control exactly how much is sent in.

What really pisses me of is that Chase is taking away what drew me to the WaMu card in the first place, namely the ability to keep an eye on my credit score. They "helpfully" directed me to Chase's own pay service for that.

@InThrees: If your minimum payment was $347, your balance would be astronomical. This policy change would be the least of your problems.

@lalaland13: Or you could just pay your credit card bill the old fashioned way. I think I have some paper checks lying around in the bottom of a desk drawer somewhere....

With my card going from Wamu to Chase I lose the perks. This is a card that will now get tucked away and get used once a year. I had been using it for almost every transaction because of the PetPerks with PetSmart. They took away the perks and now I don't even get my credit score free. I thought Wamu sucked, but Chase is worse.

So, after that date, reset the automatic payment amount? I mean, they aren't permanently requiring automatic minimums are they? This is just an artifact of the changeover, isn't it?

Two words: credit union.

As the OP, my reason for calling this a 'sneaky little gotcha' is that most credit card institutions bank on (no pun intended) their customers not bothering to read these letters all the way through. I fully recognize that Consumerist readers are a better breed, and most everyone here wouldn't be bitten by this change. I can't imagine any Consumerist readers paying the minimum monthly payment in the first place.

-Chris

@renegadebarista: here's why:

i think chase has played this game before & here's the thing - the reason for doing this is to reap more income from people who normally wouldn't pay it. either they won't pay more than their minimum (& end up paying more in finance charges), or they'll have to revert to making payments on a monthly basis (at which point they're more likely to forget a payment & incur penalty fees & interest).

i'd recommend that if you're on this plan, allow the service to keep making your mins & go in on your own to schedule a 2nd payment every month. you're less likely to make a mistake this way.

@Blaaaah: ok, but does chase's system allow you to set up auto payments for more than the minimum or not? i don't believe they give you the option.

they used to (up until about 2 years ago) - i remember a co-worker complaining about this very same thing.

@I_am_Awesome: they used to have this option though. what was the reasoning behind eliminating it?

@pmcpa2: that's how "opting-out" works in the credit card industry. agree to the terms or your account is closed - your choice.

but wait - it gets better. let's say you opt-out & close the account. in actuality, it's still active, so if you forgot to change your quarterly withdrawal for the country club to a different card, the charge goes thru & your mistake just caused you to opt-in after you already opted-out.

nice, huh?

@mac-phisto: Your Pockets can't repel shadyness of that magnitude!

My solution to a similar situation (when Bank of America did something like this to me) was to instruct my bank to make a regular, specific payment rather than letting BofA do it.

@morganlh85: How do you know there is "NO" reason? How familiar are you with the computer systems involved?

Even if there really is "NO" reason, I don't have a lot of sympathy for people who can't be bothered to check their statements once a month.

@Yossarian: If there were a legitimate"computer system" reason, it would've taken effect as soon as Chase took over WaMu.

My wife and I over the years have had credit cards with many companies. Of all the companies we had cars with the most ridiculous draconian ways to screw a customer came from Chase, that's why we had long ago paid them off unfortunately we got a double whammy when our mortgage and both our credit card accounts wound up in Chase hands this past year. We will modify our debt snowball to pay these cards off first. I recommend everyone else do the same.