"I took your advice a while ago on asking your credit card company politely for a lower APR. I asked Discover Card to give me just that.

Things seemed peachy. I called customer service and asked a lower rate and got it without any confrontation, argument or a supervisor. Strange I thought, but OK. I got my 3.9% APR for one year. Great! When I can make those large purchases for my apartment that I need to carry a balance with. Now consider I already had about a $1200 balance to boot.

I thought every time I made a payment it would apply to my oldest charges which are the ones with the 16.24% APR. It would make sense right? Isn't that how credit cards work? So in my first month with the new rate I made $68.53 worth of purchases and made a $548.79 payment.

So in theory, that $1238.98 balance I had last month at 16.24% APR should now be $690.19 right? Wrong!"

I started to notice over the past 2 or 3 months. That every payment that is made is applied to the lower APR purchases first. Thereby leaving the bigger balance with the 16.24% APR continue to sit while Discover laughs all the way to the bank.

Here is a shot of September's statement:Notice how that balance at 16.24% got bigger! I just want to let other consumers not fall for this deal as I did. To me its like a trick. You think they are helping you out by giving you a lower APR. However it only creates the illusion that you are saving money in an effort to get you to spend more. I like to think of myself as savvy for reading this website however I took the bait on this one.

Not sure what recourse I have here, so in protest I have stopped using Discover for any purchases.

—RJB, Staten Island, NY

3.9% fixed is pretty sweet so we wouldn't give up on Discover yet. You could still get a new credit card with a lower interest rate and do a balance transfer. Stop buying new stuff and pay it off.

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