Amex Scrooge - Panics on Black Friday, Cuts Credit Lines TODAY! Amex Ruins X-Mas!

[Anonymous]

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@Marvintran wrote:

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Sorry to hear that nycc2, is this on your plum card or green card?

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It was on my Green and Gold Skymiles cards.

Now here is why it is a real *****;

For anyone who may have followed, I spent the two years or so religiously rebuilding/building credit, spending hours on here every week, doing disputes, OC letter, fights with CRAs, carefully adding accounts/inquiries, managing utilization, etc so forth so on. I had every card on Auto-Pay, had sms alerts from every card to my phone for anything, had Outlook Alerts for statement cut/card due/etc, did semi-weekly checks of credit-card, bank balances etc., stayed on top of everything.

I did *that* because I knew right about now I'd be ready for last leg of launching a business I've spent 5 years developing and would need massive amounts of biz credit. A lot of THAT is based on Biz PG Credit Lines.  I hadden gotten from low 600s to mid-700s and was going to be high 700s maybe 800 once i paid down balances and got the two erroneous Bally's off next month. Plus I had gotten my corp reinstated, set up with D&B, added vendor lines, gotten business space and 411 set up etc. In other words, I was a couple weeks away from being able to start getting some decent biz credit.  I was even going to transfer my initial lines to my personal to reimburse self and get scores up higher.

The Amex thing happens now? And, the impetus is because I was being super-diligent about making sure my auto-pay worked and there system was a mess and I STILL paid on time?

If I can't get Amex to reinstate, all my work is for naught, and instead of having high-700s perfect credit to act as the engine to get over the hump on this 25,000 hours of work, I'll have accounts closing/defaulting on me for good and be in the 500s before I know it, and the corp may as well just be a paperweight.

I am going to try to find someone at the deparement I dealt with to work with me; despartely hoping that once the CRA sends a 'Mea Culpa' to Amex on their letterhead, my balances are down, and I can go over with them the fact i've been a member for 25 years with no lates and to please reinstate, even if with $500 line so as not to destroy my credit on top of everything.

It's bad enough the timing of all my work including credit building comes at the worst time in a century, I was in a position to handle that; to have Amex pull the rug out from under my feet is beyond the pale.

[PCR20]

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@WhirledPeasPlease wrote:

You might want to read the "Closing Credit Cards" thread which is sticked under "Helpful Links" at the top of the CC forum.

Trust me, I hate Amex too, and will probably close my Greenie when the AF is due.

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Thanks for the input and the reminder to re-read the stickies. 

Somehow, my brain got stuck thinking closed accounts don't age the same as open ones.

They dropped the limit so low that it can't mess with my FICOs by closing it.

As soon as I got that through my head, I hopped on-line, filled in a 15 minute pre-approval from USBank and whamo, added back 20K of what AmEx sucked out of my limits.  

Now it's time to post an In-Full payment to AmEx and will close the darned thing as soon as it clears.

To them I say " So long AmEx, hope to read about you soon when you file for Bankruptcy after alienating all of your best customers."

[wmarat]

I personally am not questioning your creditwothiness and would lend you money. At the same time, may be Amex (BOA, Citi, Chase, GEMB etc) see 15% DTI as too high? (15% of 185k is 27750 which might be seen as too much of debt).

I honestly believe, that Amex wants everyone to treat credit cards as charge cards and wants to see 0 balances and anything else (scores, negatives on report, payment history etc) just does not matter.

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@TCarson wrote:

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@wmarat wrote:

Could anyone profile good customer as Amex sees it?

Or may be Amex severs relationship with not so good customers ( by Amex's criteria)

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I know what they think is a "not so good customer" 

In establishing credit over 35 years ago; 

No lates ever, period (not on any accounts in 35+ years)

35 years of perfect credit as reported on all three CRA’s

Less than 15% debt-income ratio (cars/boat/cc)

No BKs 

Never a collection account.

Absolutely nothing ever in the area of my “Potentially Negative”  credit reports

35+ years on the same $185K+ job

A house is positive (despite today’s market)

Oldest CC account = 1987 (still open)

Average CC account age = 12 years

Total Open CC accounts = 5

Total accounts in good standing = 28 (including old closed mortgages I paid off years back)

Total accounts with negative information = 0

Available credit = 45K (without AmEx)

All 3 Credit Scores in the upper 700’s (low 800’s by Experian PLUS)

No “risky” behavior charges, although I did use the card at Wal-Mart once, just two months before they attacked the account. 

Yep, after looking this up, I can now see why American Express thinks I’m a risk.

A risk of paying them off every time, on time!

If them lowering my limit had no effect on my FICO, I wouldn't care at all.

What irks me is I passed up some excellent low-interest/high limit offers from USBank to go for the AmEx Blue and the 25K CL they gave me.

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[PCR20]

First off, thank you for taking the time to reply to my rant.

After trying to talk to AmEx reps about some of these issues for the past few days, it is indeed nice to “hear” from someone that makes sense and speaks clearly.

If I had any investments in AmEx, I would cringe to think they want everyone to pay off their credit bill to $0 each month.

That would work with the old "Gold" cards, where they make money from the yearly dues, but the newer Blue and such have no annual fees. 

They have to see their customers carry a balance so they can charge them a modest interest rate.
In my personal opinion, I hope you are right and they do want everyone to pay to $0 each month.
This will let me see the latter part of my last post come true when they go under.
 
My distaste for AmEx is not based solely on my own experience.
Since I started to talk to friends and neighbors, I have heard some of the most disgusting stories that I would not have believed before seeing how poorly they handled my own non-situation.

Before this, I listened to the stories and figured that they must be leaving out something…no way good’ol AmEx would do bad things to their good customers…right?....WRONG!

A quick search on Google shows hundreds of other people getting the same disservice as of late from AmEx. There are also some very interesting sites out there setup specifically about AmEx’s underhanded practices.

Also, I do think that my current balances of 28K are too high, but I did just buy a new car a couple of months ago.
I’ll have that bill gone as fast as my tax accountant will allow.

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@wmarat wrote:

I personally am not questioning your creditwothiness and would lend you money. At the same time, may be Amex (BOA, Citi, Chase, GEMB etc) see 15% DTI as too high? (15% of 185k is 27750 which might be seen as too much of debt).

I honestly believe, that Amex wants everyone to treat credit cards as charge cards and wants to see 0 balances and anything else (scores, negatives on report, payment history etc) just does not matter.

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Message Edited by TCarson on 03-22-2009 06:57 PM

Message Edited by TCarson on 03-22-2009 08:49 PM