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I had been with Advanta for a while and thought they were awesome, then they jacked my rate up by 22.5% costing me 450.00 in interest I was not aware of. I have a 760 FICO score, am worth well over 2 million and own multiple apartment buildings, pay my bills and have plenty of money in the bank at all times. I immediately paid my balance off and proceeded to ask them "to do the math on why my rate went up with little notice". I typically put about 50,000 a month on various cards to gain frequent flyer mile points or other incentatives and normally would have no use for Advanta. My guess is they are going under and just screwing anyone they can....
My fear, is if they did this to me what the hell is going to happen to people who cannot pay their balance immediately and get crushed......basically hurting everyone in the process.....didn't we learn this from the mortgage crisis? Credit cards need to be equally on the hook at this point and their disclosure of rates is impossible for any regular consumer to understand. I work with attorneys all the time and finding the new APR was like understanding what women truly want :-).
With that kind of spending, I would use an Amex Platinum Charge... you would be offered black in no time!!
I have 2 Advanta cards. 1 I just had to close to lock in my 16.10 rate because they sent notice to increase it to 34.99.
My other Advanta card is 2.99 for life of balance on BT but the purchase APR is 37.99. so I make sure to pay the bill the second it comes in, they are just hoping I miss a payment to take away my BT offer!
I think Advanta lended HUGE credit lines to businesses and offered these fixed for life of bt offers like amex did and then realized they are WAY overextended and instead of doing whats right and probably smart, they rate jack everyone so they either pay the account off and close it or they go delinquent because they can't keep up with the new payments. This way the bank has less credit extended and they can write off the losses they feel are going to happen no matter what earlier.
ITS STUPID, they are doing exactly what the mortgage companies did and they are going to get the exact same results.
I also put around $25-50,000 per month on various cards mostly paying in full and rarely paying interest. My FICO had dropped from the high 700s to the mid 700s about the time Advanta upped my rate. This was due to Amex CLD me causing me to use cards that show on my personal reports and therefore affect my FICO.
Advanta Ratejacked my Business card about 3 months ago from 6.99% to 20.59%. By the time I received the statement I had paid interest for about 3 weeks on around $4000 that had not been paid from the previous month. They cheated me out of only $45 in additional interest but I paid them in full online that day while I spoke with the CSR. They claimed they sent me a letter but the letter arrived almost a week after that so around one month after they changed the rate.
They did offer to drop the rate to what they were trying to call a reasonable 18.99%. The 7% previous rate as a business expense and there for pre-tax is high enough that I would rarely be willing to pay it. I didn't use the card at all for two months and they lowered the rate to 16.99%. I recently did make one charge on the Advanta card around $11K, which I will PIF before the due date. I'm doing that mainly to see what response I will get from Advanta.
I have simply asked some vendors to give me an open account where I used to pay them via credit card. They get paid in 30 days but don't have the credit card fee discount fee. They are happy, I am happy, Advanta and Amex aren't making any money on me. I just have some extra bookkeeping to do.
After having the typical experiences with B of A 20 years ago, I would have never believed that they would turn out to be the good guys now. I used a cash advance check to pay off Amex and paid a $99 fee for a $46,000 check at 0% interest for a year. I will remember this and give BofA my business.