Credit
I have finally committed the cardinal financial sin of forgetting to make a single $6 payment on a credit card. I didn't even know this. There is nothing on Capital One's online banking app to indicate this. I'd hope for some kind of giant flashing red light alerting me that I may have just accrued fees and hurt my credit rating, but I ONLY found out about this because I looked in my transaction history and found a late fee. If I hadn't suspected it might be there because I didn't remember paying anything last month, I never would have known. Even Mint didn't tell me about this.
Luckily, I don't think they report the first missed payment, and it's paid now.
So this had me wondering if I could just have the cards pay themselves automatically every month. I only use them occasionally, so there's never enough of a balance that I should have to worry about when the money is taken out. And since I own them primarily for the credit score bump in the first place, I should certainly not have to worry that forgetting to click three buttons on a Web site will hurt me somehow.
It turns out that Capital One also doesn't tell me anywhere how to do this. I found plenty of references to automatic bill payment, which will let me pay other debts by moving them onto my Magical Debt Card. While I'm sure that's useful to someone who doesn't understand math, I'm more interested in how to pay a debt by actually giving it money. Come on, this is 2009.
I gave up on their site and turned to Google, which produced this FAQ, indicating that there is in fact an automatic payment system. I just have to call their phone number. I did so today, and now I have to wait for some document in the mail to sign and return, and then wait for confirmation in the mail.
Now, hang on. They gave me a credit card-two, in fact-without asking me to sign anything at all. They also raised my credit limit multiple times, effectively giving me several extra any-time no-questions-asked loans, without so much as asking.
They know my bank's routing number. They know my account number. All I have to do to manually pay off a card is go to their site, log in, and agree to have the money taken. It would be trivial to let me set up automatic payments online. Hell, I could probably write a cronjob to automate clicking the right buttons once a month.
But for some reason, their automatic payment system is mentioned seemingly only in an FAQ targeting people who are applying for cards-not people who already have them. And it isn't mentioned in the voice menu for the number they provide; you have to get to a real person and specifically ask for it. And the voice prompt asks for a card number, and if I hadn't explicitly asked about my other card, only the one card would have gotten automatic payments. And I still have to wait for something to sign and send it back off, then wait enough time that the guy I was talking to reminded me twice that I have to keep making payments until they mail back a confirmation.
Heaven forbid they lose their right to charging me more than twice what I forgot to pay. Not shady at all.
Luckily, I don't think they report the first missed payment, and it's paid now.
So this had me wondering if I could just have the cards pay themselves automatically every month. I only use them occasionally, so there's never enough of a balance that I should have to worry about when the money is taken out. And since I own them primarily for the credit score bump in the first place, I should certainly not have to worry that forgetting to click three buttons on a Web site will hurt me somehow.
It turns out that Capital One also doesn't tell me anywhere how to do this. I found plenty of references to automatic bill payment, which will let me pay other debts by moving them onto my Magical Debt Card. While I'm sure that's useful to someone who doesn't understand math, I'm more interested in how to pay a debt by actually giving it money. Come on, this is 2009.
I gave up on their site and turned to Google, which produced this FAQ, indicating that there is in fact an automatic payment system. I just have to call their phone number. I did so today, and now I have to wait for some document in the mail to sign and return, and then wait for confirmation in the mail.
Now, hang on. They gave me a credit card-two, in fact-without asking me to sign anything at all. They also raised my credit limit multiple times, effectively giving me several extra any-time no-questions-asked loans, without so much as asking.
They know my bank's routing number. They know my account number. All I have to do to manually pay off a card is go to their site, log in, and agree to have the money taken. It would be trivial to let me set up automatic payments online. Hell, I could probably write a cronjob to automate clicking the right buttons once a month.
But for some reason, their automatic payment system is mentioned seemingly only in an FAQ targeting people who are applying for cards-not people who already have them. And it isn't mentioned in the voice menu for the number they provide; you have to get to a real person and specifically ask for it. And the voice prompt asks for a card number, and if I hadn't explicitly asked about my other card, only the one card would have gotten automatic payments. And I still have to wait for something to sign and send it back off, then wait enough time that the guy I was talking to reminded me twice that I have to keep making payments until they mail back a confirmation.
Heaven forbid they lose their right to charging me more than twice what I forgot to pay. Not shady at all.