Credit Card Applications Denied

calmom
Sun, 10 Jan 2010 01:25:10 +0000

intparent – if it were me, I’d rather pay more for credit from a bank that I have good relations with than less for a bank where I was treated like that. I mean… sometimes it isn’t worth the savings.

I do know how those bank charges can add up – my d has BofA and has spent more time than not over the past 2 years living and traveling abroad, and it would make you sick to see how much she is dinged for foreign transaction fees and currency exchange and foreign ATM fees every time she withdraws money or puts something on a credit card. But BofA has been great to us. I think what impressed me the most was when my daughter was in India and I needed to book her return flight. So I was putting a one-way airfare on some foreign airline on my card from home. Plus I was making the charge at around 3am – I had been monitoring several sites waiting for fares to drop and when I saw a relatively low fare I wanted to grab it. I made the charge and literally within about 90 seconds received an email from BofA asking me to confirm the transaction – I did and it went through. Then the next day BofA called me again to re-confirm. It was obvious to me why the charge would trigger a flag for potential fraud – but I was amazed at how quickly their system reacted.

The point is: what if you are traveling abroad and your credit card gets lost or stolen, or you are victimized by some sort of fraud – such as someone pulling your credit card number off a a receipt, or one of those fake ATM’s that is rigged to steal your number? Is Capitol One going to respond to your needs? Or are you going to spend the next 6 months of your life arguing with them over paying for unauthorized charges?



I don’t want to make this into an ad for BofA. I have had very good experiences with BofA in California, but my son lives in Washington and has terrible experiences there. I didn’t believe what he was telling me until I looked on line and found that apparently the Washington BofA isn’t even on the same computer network and they don’t offer some of the services we take for granted here in California. So I told him to move his money – if he’s not getting the customer service we’re used to, then he really should find a better option. I’m encouraging him to try a credit union there.

The main point is not to promote a specific bank or card. Rather, just that you need to consider customer service and respect to be a high priority no matter who you are dealing with. You can’t put a dollar value on that, but it might be more than the 3% you think you will save with a company that treats you like crap.