Why I hate Chase Bank

Oh, yeah, this is a rant but hey, my blog, I get that prerogative.

Back in my stupid youth and new motherhood, I applied for and received a TRU CC from Chase bank. I was in love because I was spending tons of money at TRU anyway so hey, bonus time. If only I could go back in time and tell my younger self that it was soooooo not worth it. I got maybe a couple of hundred in rewards but have paid sooooo much for that so many times over with their bs charges and other crap. Our problems with them really started when Mark lost his job. All of our other cards were very willing to put us on special programs to help lower our interest and payments for a year until we could get on our feet again. Not so Chase. Their exact words were "Too Bad". They actually hiked our interest rates and never let an opportunity pass to charge us a fee. Check arrived a day late due to the mail system? $39 You mailed the check early to avoid that but we decided to change the days in your billing cycle to up your minimum payment and you paid $5 too little? $39 I'm serious, they did everything they could to charge that $39 fee every month, sometimes even finding ways to do it 2xs in one month.

Now, when I went out of my way to pay them in FULL last month to finally be done with them, including dealing with an extra $9.95 check by phone fee what do they do? They are the only bank I've EVER dealt with that still charges FULL INTEREST for month when they get paid off!!!! An extra $60 this time! Absolutely ridiculous. And when I called up and tried to get an explanation for it and told them that I had not had this problem with any of the other banks whose cards I'm busy paying off, their reaction...."Too bad, that's how we do business". Yep, that's how they do business all right. F*** all the little people as much and as often as they can. And of course, this has to be the bank that "saved" WaMu which we had just moved to last year so now we are on the hunt for a new bank again because I will NOT do business with them and there is NO WAY I want them having any access to my money to lend out and screw other people with.

So now we need to try and find another bank that is big enough to have branches around so we can actually do our banking (learned our lesson with the Credit Union about that one) but small enough that they actually still care about their customers and that strange thing called customer service which Chase seems to think means where the customer bends over and takes their crap every time. I truly HATE that we have to switch banks again because I do know how that looks on our credit report but I just know deep down that if we stay where we are, we will get screwed even worse. That's all Chase knows how to do.