Mary Clare
Albany,#2Consumer Comment
Fri, July 13, 2007
I have been carefully montioring my Chase account online so that I can time my credit card payments to coincide with my paycheck. For the past five months since opening the account, my due date has been the 6th or 7th of the month (depending on which falls on a weekday). When this last statement was printed, suddenly the new date is the first of the month with NOprior notification that they were changing it--giving me, in effect, a whole week LESS to make the payment. I looked at the NEW printed statement and it's there in big letters; but if I hadn't received this until I received it in the mail AND read it over very carefully, I could very well have ended up making an inadvertant late payment. Their explanation is that it is "business standard" to change the due date for those of us who "partially pay" their balance every month so that we don't have "less than 20 days after a statement is printed" to pay the balance. Huh?? Isn't "partial payment" the idea behind a revolving account to begin with? And if you want to give an adequate cusion between the statement print date and the next due date, why would you change the DUE DATE to an earlier date instead of the changing the STATEMENT DATE?? And next month (or in some subsequent month), are they going to fix it so that I suddenly have TWO payments due in that month?? This has me completely scratching my head. Oh...they have kindly "offered" to change my due date to a more convenient date if I wish. What I *wish* is that they hadn't changed it to begin with -- or at least extended me the courtesy of some prior notification! The red flags have been raised.