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Showing posts from March 7, 2010

More on credit cards

My last post on credit cards got me thinking about the recent change I made to one of my cards. At the end of last year, Citi jacked my interest rate up from 11.9% to 24.9%. I've never missed a payment with them, and have never had any fees incurred. I called them to find out why and the excuse they gave me was "it's to maintain the level of service you're accustomed to". In other words "we're jacking the rates up before the credit card reform bill prevents us from doing it". So I decided to cancel the card and got put through to one of their customer retention people. After some wrangling, they offered to drop the rate by 1%. I pointed out that I could cancel the card and sign up again on their website and get a 4.9% introductory rate but it didn't make any difference. Then they offered me 50,000 miles for my American Airlines account. Time to play them at their own game. I took the dropped interest rate and the 50,000 miles and let it lie for