spugbrap’s blog

From the FIA Card Services (aka Evil Spawn of the Bank of America+Fleet and Bank of America+MBNA mergers) Privacy Policy (emphasis added by me):

This notice describes the privacy practices of FIA Card Services for consumer financial products and services governed by the laws of the United States of America and applies to open, closed and inactive accounts with FIA Card Services.

For some reason, this concerns me a little bit.

I have two open accounts with them right now, and am going to go ahead and opt out of their information sharing options for both accounts. But it’s not people like me that I’m concerned about.

I’m concerned about people who may have ever had an account with Bank of America, MBNA, or any of the other credit card companies that they have collectively gobbled up over the years. People who may have canceled their cards long ago, cut them up, and forgotten all about them. People who may have even thrown away all of their bills/terms/etc., because it’s been so long.

According to the paragraph quoted above, FIA Card Services may share their information with other companies, even if their accounts are closed! Maybe I’m just naïve, but I never would have imagined that after I closed a credit card account, and stopped doing business with a company, they might still share my personal data with arbitrary third parties.

I’ll bet they don’t still mail annual Privacy Policy notices to everyone who has closed accounts. But, all of this may be a moot point. The wording is ambiguous enough that even though they *might* do something with that data, they probably don’t, and I have no positive proof that they actually do engage in this unethical practice. So, they get the benefit of the doubt, for now. But it’s still creepy, and they’re still evil for other reasons.

About 3 years ago, I got a new credit card called the Merrill Lynch Platinum Plus Visa. The card came with a nice, big credit limit, and had a fixed interest rate of 5.9% for purchases, balance transfers, and even cash advances. I’d never seen a rate so low for cash advances. I did not plan to do any cash advances, but it was still nice to know that I could, without suffering a typical 17-27% cash advance interest rate.

Anyways, this card happened to be managed by MBNA. I used the card for all my credit purchases, and it was my favorite card for a while. Then, in February of 2006, there was notice in with my statement, which said that they were changing my terms, due to a “change in [their] business practices”. These changes included making the interest rate for everything variable, which came out to 8.9% at that time. I was carrying a balance of over $13,000 on it at that time, so I was not looking forward to this rate increase.

In fact, I was so pissed off about it that I did what it said in the small print on the notice: I sent them a written letter, refusing the new terms. This meant that I could keep the existing interest rate, until I paid off the balance, but if I made any purchases on the card, it would automatically constitute acceptance of the new terms. So, I went through and switched everything that was linked to that card (SmartTag toll transponder, automatic monthly payment for Hwar Do lessons, and a few other recurring payments) to a different card.

Well, two weeks later, I received a notice from MBNA talking about how their merger with Bank of America had completed in January, after having been given the green light by the FTC in December. So, I’m pretty sure this merger is the change in business practices they were talking about. They sure didn’t waste any time making unfavorable changes to their terms!

So, my MBNA card was to be come a BoA card, slowly over the course of the year — the same way my Fleet card became a BoA card the previous year. We put the cards away and did not use them for 3 months straight. They still raised my limit a couple times during those months, and kept sending me promos/convenience checks, in the hopes that I’d suddenly have a need for thousands of dollars and that the promo checks (with 5.9% rate — same as the fixed rate my whole account had since opening it) would make me forget about the fact that I’d have to accept all their terms if I use them.

Anyways, I thought I’d changed all my recurring payments to use a different card, but apparently I missed one. :( The University of Phoenix billed me for a $70 “resource fee”. This is a fee that you have to pay for every class you take, and if you don’t pay it manually by a certain date, they auto-charge it. You’re supposed to pay it by the date the class starts, but I’ve always (for about 3 years before) paid it after the class ended, along with my tuition payment. They’ve never auto-billed me for it so early. Yes, technically they did what their rules say that they do, but it really irked me that they’d never done that to me before, and had to chose this particular time to start.

I tried and tried to get ahold of anyone in the finance/billing department at UOP, but could not reach anybody. I left voicemails for several people, and sent them emails as well, but nobody called me back or replied to the email. Actually, one person did call me back, about 3 weeks later.

So, I automatically accepted BoA’s new terms. I eventually accepted that at least 8.9% was still better than the rates on any of my other cards, which had both suffered from merger-induced terms changing (the previously mentioned fleet card, and a chase card). Thankfully, the rate has not gone up any more since that one time, while my other cards have continued getting worse.

I think it’s time to shop around and find a new card, though, from a bank other than Bank of America or Chase, so I can just cancel both of my damn BoA cards. I’ll probably switch my checking and savings accounts to another bank while I’m at it, since BoA has just done one thing after another to make my existing credit cards suck.

This rant has been a long time coming, but a post on the Consumerist blog today, entitled “BoA Buys MBNA, Starts Charging Customers Extra For Not Paying Balances Off In Full“, inspired me to write it up. Forgive me if the timing of some of these events is a little bit off, but the overall gist of it is the same, regardless of some of the details.

I opened checking and savings accounts at Bank of America about 3 years ago, because Wachovia royally screwed me over in my first overdraft situation ever. I shopped around for a new bank for a while, particularly soliciting word-of-mouth advice from friends and coworkers. I was impressed with BoA’s online banking, in which check card transactions appeared on the website instantly. This was much better than Wachovia’s, where it sometimes took *days* for a charge to appear on the website, even in a “pending” state.

Well, it wasn’t long before BoA bought Fleet. This seemed like a good thing to me, because my Fleet credit card (my primary credit card, which I’d held for longer than any other cards) suffered from a more painfully slow charge-to-website time than Wachovia’s check card. With my Fleet card, my charges would sometimes take 7-14 DAYS to appear online, even in a pending state. Unacceptable. But I kept using the card, because of the positive impact it had on my credit rating (the many years the account had been open, and because of the fixed 7.99% interest rate).

Actually, I should point out that at some point prior to the BoA-Fleet announcement, my Fleet card suddenly changed its terms, instituting a variable interest rate which was, at that time, around 13.5%. I called their Customer Service and complained about this, and they lowered my rate down to a lower variable rate, around 7.4% or so. At some point, a year or two later, I received notice about a class-action lawsuit against Fleet, regarding the changing of fixed rates into variable rates (not very “fixed” if they can change it whenever they want to). Although technically they may have been allowed to change it, it still wasn’t very nice, and they ended up settling the suit. A while later, I got over $100 back on my Fleet card in two settlement-related deposits. That was cool.

Anyways… After BoA bought Fleet, they immediately changed the terms of the card, making the interest rate go back up to something-teen-point-something. Ugh. A year or so later, BoA finally assimilated the Fleet card into its online banking system, though, and it did, in fact, speed up the charge-to-website time. It also gave me back a feature that the Fleet website had taken away at some point — the ability to download transactions from the currently open billing period into my personal financial software (MS Money, the subject of another rant!). That was nice. It also allowed me to now make payments to the Fleet card (now a BoA card) much faster, and I could even do instant cash advances from the card, in the event of an emergency, directly into my checking account. This came in handy a couple times. Yes, the fees are horrible for that, but still better than dealing with overdraft/NSF hell!

Over time, BoA has changed the terms even more, making the variable interest rate even higher (currently 17.24% for purchases, 24.24% for cash advances), raising balance transfer fees, late fees, and generally making every other rate/fee higher as well.

I’ve kept the card, though, because it’s now pushing me close to the 10-year mark, which should look good on my credit report. Oh, and one other positive thing in all of this… When I got this Fleet card, it was called the “Winners Edge MasterCard”. Every time you used the card, there was a slight chance that you could win a prize of getting that charge paid for. I won a couple times over the first couple years, with charges in the $5-20 range (of course it was never any of the $500-5000 charges!). At some point, the card quietly stopped offering that reward. Boo! Hiss! But when BoA took over the card, they renamed to to “Power Rewards MasterCard” and I started accumulating points-per-dollar-spent. That has continued, and that’s better than no rewards.

Anyways.. That’s [more than] enough for this rant. Next one will be about how BoA has destroyed my Merrill Lynch Platinum Plus Visa.

This morning, I didn’t have enough bread to make my usual breakfast: a peanut peanut butter and jelly sandwich made with toast. Plus, I was extraordinarily sleepy.

So, I decided to stop at Caribou on the way to work, to get a mocha latte and a chocolate caramel muffin.

I decided to take a Vivarin instead, and wait until I was closer to work to get food; specifically, at the drive-thru Dunkin Donuts in Manassas Park. As I pulled into the drive-thru, I realized that I can’t buy donuts that way. I wanted two donuts, but I needed to check what kinds they had, and what looked good to me today, which is something I could not do from the drive-thru.

So, I parked and went into the restaurant. After picking out a drink that looked and sounded interesting, and waiting in line for a few minutes, I ordered two donuts. With the drink, the total came to $3.something, so I handed the cashier my check card. She handed it back, and said that they do not accept credit cards.

This boggled my mind, since this is 2006, and even temporary Fireworks stands, off-brand gas stations, and parking garages accept credit cards. I used to always look for the VISA/MC symbols in a store’s door/window, or ask before ordering something, if I wasn’t sure. But the thought never even crossed my mind, since it’s so rare to encounter a place that does not accept credit cards.

Well, I only had $1 in my wallet, and was not about to try to decide which ONE donut to buy. So I walked out, and continued down the road to the Giant Food grocery store. I thought that might actually turn out to be a good thing, since I could get Krispy Kreme donuts from the bakery section, there. I was bummed to find out that this particular Giant bakes their own donuts. I could have bought a pre-packaged box of Krispy Kreme donuts, but I really only wanted to get two donuts, not 6 or 12, so I went ahead and bought two Giant bakery donuts.

The donuts were too sweet, and not as tasty as Krispy Kreme would have been, so I feel like all of that time and effort was kind of wasted. I think Dunkin Donuts would have satisfied me as well, but unfortunately they are still living in the Stone Age or something.

A few minutes ago, I realized that this is not the first time I’ve been disappointed by Dunkin Donuts. A year or so ago, I stopped at the one in Herndon, and even had my kids all psyched up about getting some donnuts. No credit cards. I do not carry cash much, at all, because I prefer to use credit/check cards to keep track of where money goes. So I had to find a different place to get donuts that day as well.

So, I am hereby doing a “lazy boycott” of Dunkin Donuts. Lazy, because I very rarely go out with the intention of buying donuts, and rarely carry [much/any] cash, so I will avoid buying Dunkin Donuts without expending any actual effort. However, if the opportunity ever *does* present itself (cash + donut craving + near a Dunkin Donuts), I will go out of my way to buy some [pre-packaged if necessary] Krispy Kreme donuts somewhere else instead.

**edit**
Oh yeah, in a quick effort to see if this was a company-wide anti-cc policy, I ran across this funny story, in which (among lots of hiliarious stuff) I learned that some Dunkin Donuts stores do accept credit cards. Definitely worth a read!
http://www.zug.com/pranks/credit_card