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Edited on Fri Jul-10-09 09:52 AM by LiberalEsto
I was floored to discover today that my mortgage company, Citimortgage, is no longer accepting credit cards for payments. They only accept bank debit accounts.
This is crazy! Why suddenly is a credit card payment no longer good enough? It's not like Citibank doesn't issue its own credit cards. But even their own cards are no good, because they just plain no longer take credit cards, period. :mad:
Picture some frantic homeowner trying to avoid being late on a payment, desperately trying to buy a little time by putting the payment on the credit card. Surprise! The mortgage company no longer takes your card, even if your credit is fine. I wonder whether any other mortgage companies besides Citibank are doing this.
Initially I found that the Citimortgage website has no option to pay by anything other than debit card (with a $10 fee). Then I called "customer service", as they laughingly call it. Various people I spoke to assured me that I could make my credit card payment by contacting their collections department. After being transferred and repeating a number of menu options, I got through to collections, only to be told there was no way I could make this month's mortgage payment with my credit card. They only accepted debit cards (fee to pay over the phone $15).
When I asked when this policy had been changed, they said it happened about 2 months ago. Obviously many of their customer service people weren't aware of this change. I asked to speak to a manager, was put on hold, and listened to more than 10 minutes of a recorded voice yammering about how great Citimortgage is, before getting fed up and hanging up. Which I'm sure was exactly what they wanted me to do.
Next I called my congressman's office and told them about it. I pointed out that this Citimortgage policy has the potential to hurt many homeowners who are teetering on the brink of foreclosure. They're going to have a legislative aide call me back. I also emailed a business writer at the local paper about it.
Isn't this swell? How many billions have we taxpayers shelled out to bail out these big banks? And they in turn look for ways to shaft us at every turn -- raising interest rates, adding new fees, and so forth. I heard some radio discussion the other day about a new bank fee called a dormancy fee that gets taken out of your account if you don't put money in or take money out for a given period. Now apparently some bank has shortened this dormancy period in order to gouge account holders.
PS I know paying the mortgage via credit card is not generally a great idea. However my husband just changed jobs and won't get his paycheck until the end of the month, so I was trying to avoid hurting our credit rating by trying to get the mortgage paid before the 15th of the month.
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