Pure Evil

Here's a nice (if by "nice" you really mean "irritating and frustrating") reminder of why Giant Credit Card Companies are evil incarnate and why I'm so eager to end my relationship with them.

As you know if you're a regular reader of this blog, I obtained a Discover card that gives a 5% rebate on all gasoline purchases to help offset the rising cost of gasoline. We intended to use this card solely as a gas card, and we have, except that we kind of ended up using it to pay for a significant portion of our honeymoon, which pretty much maxed the card out. I've been keeping the balance down enough each month to give us enough room to keep using it to buy gas, but with all of our commuting, by the end of the month it's usually maxed out again.

Anyway. So I recently received an e-mail alert from Discover warning me that I was nearing my limit, but when I logged into my account it said that I still had enough to cover one more tank of gas, with a little cushion to spare, so I didn't worry about it.

And then my credit report got pinged with an over limit alert from Discover. I logged in to check my statement, and saw that they had charged me for services I'm signed up for with them, including an identity theft protection charge that I didn't even remember signing up for. Their charges put me over my limit. Now, if I was, say, trying to buy gas, and didn't have enough room on the card, the charge would have been rejected, and that would have been that. But the credit card company pushes their charges through regardless of whether there is actually enough room in my account to cover them, and then they report me to the credit bureaus for going over limit. Nice. I'm sure they'll charge me an over limit fee, too. Bastiges.

Of course, as soon as I was aware I'd gone over limit I signed on and made a payment, but that doesn't help my credit report. I also called to cancel the identity theft protection, and did so despite customer service's best attempts to in turns terrify me and then make me feel like a reckless idiot for daring to cancel their protection when there are so many big, bad identity thieves out there, lurking about and digging through my trash and whatnot.

While viewing my statement I also learned that I've been paying for memberships with Freecreditreport.com's credit monitoring service that I didn't realize I'd signed up for months ago, one for me and one for Matt. I cancelled those, too. This is what I get for never looking at my statements. I guess now I should check over the statements for my other credit cards and make sure I'm not paying for any more weird crap I never meant to sign up for, not to mention get into the habit of reading my statements every month instead of just blindly making the payments.

Stupid credit cards. Man, I hope I get that loan.