How Some Credit Card Issuers Try to Trick You

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For two days I've been learning about how some credit card issuers try to trick you into paying more fees than you deserve to pay. The specific card I'm learning these lessons from is my Care Credit card. Care Credit is used mostly for medical expenses. We used it a lot for the past 18 months while we were getting root canals and implants within a three month period. During this period we had to charge over $2100 in dental bills. We took advantage of some promotional offers that gave us about a year of deferred interest. If we paid the entire promotional balance off before its due date, we paid no interest at all. If we didn't, we paid all the interest for the entire amount at 26.99 %. Three of those promotional balances come due in three days and total $3266. This is one day after our federal tax bill for 2017 and first estimated tax bill for next year are due. So we are being hit hard this week. I normally pay my Care Credit bills on their website. Last month I paid the minimum payment because of some of their other policies. I knew I'd have a huge payment this month, so I wanted that to satisfy the minimum for this month. Yesterday I went to the site to pay for the rest of the first two of the promotional balances due. My first payment had been $620 toward the $984 due. Imagine my surprise to see that promotional balance still reading $795. I expected it to read $364. I paid the rest of what was owed and the other $700 promotion. Then I called to see what happened to my $620 payment. Here's what I found out. Try to follow this. I have six more promotional balances due in 2019. I was told that those balances have different terms and that a certain percentage of my minimum payment each month has to go to each one of those additional promotions before the rest is applied to the next promotion due. Yet on my statements there is nothing to indicate that the terms between the promotions are different. I would not know if I had not called. I also learned that when I pay online, my extra payments are not necessarily allocated to the next promotions due. I have to make a phone call to allocate my payments to specific promotions. One more thing. The promotions all seem to end on the closing date of a statement. Unless you go online to see what's happening, you might not know that your payments weren't applied to pay off your promotions before the due date. If you do not pay off the entire promotion before its due date, they can charge you all the interest for the entire life of the promotion -- even if you are only short a few dollars. The customer service rep told me I could see the difference in terms of the promotions on my statement, but I can't. They are all listed the same way. So when I last charged my card on a promotional offer it never occurred to me to ask if the terms had changed. But on the statement it says that every provider can have different terms and the only way to know the terms is to ask the provider when you are charging the card. I think it might be to my advantage to discontinue this card. As I get older it's hard to stay on top of these tricky terms. I imagine a lot of seniors older than I probably need as much or more dental work than we do. I hope they don't get caught in any of these traps and get charged a fortune because they didn't understand how their payments would be applied. I don't know if other banks do this, but if you use credit cards and take advantage of promotional offers, read the terms very carefully. You wouldn't want to pay hundreds of dollars of interest because a promotional balance might have been a few dollars short when due because a payment you thought covered it was allocated somewhere else. Have you learned any ways credit card issuers trick to trick people into paying more than they should in interest? Have you ever been caught in this kind of trap? Do you have any advice for people using credit in your country if you don't live in the USA?