Robert
Irvine,#2Consumer Comment
Fri, May 11, 2012
last month since i had to ravel overseas i made my payment in advanced two days prior to my billing cycle, and to my surprice they had penalized me and charged me a late fee for paying in advanced
- The underlined part is your issue. A credit card is considered an "open ended" account and by law the creditor MUST apply the payment the day it was received. In fact if a creditor "held" the payment or tried to apply it to the next billing cycle, you could actually complain that they did that in order to try and get more interest. Since it was received before your cycle closed it was applied to the previous cycle. This is exactly what every other creditor would do. If you then fail to make an actual payment in the next billing cycle you will be charged your late fees.
There are many ways you could have avoided this. The simplest was to just delay the payment. If you use on-line billing every on-line billing system I have seen has a date you can request to send/apply the payment. All you had to do was set it up before you left to be sent a few days later. If you mail your payment you could have asked someone else to drop it in the mail a couple of days later.
While you seem to be upset about the late fee. Remember they can't apply your "early" payment to the next cycle, so you still owe at least the minimum payment for that month. So if you haven't paid that you need to immediately or you will continue to accrue more fees and interest, along with negative reporting on your credit.