Capital One "Available Credit" Weirdness

[shane82388]

So I have the classic Crapital One Platinum card with the toy credit limit of $500 and I noticed soemthing strange with it that was going on....

So i had about $100 balace or so at the beginning of august and i made some charges on it and stuff during the month, but the entire time my "available credit" said $400 whenever i logged in to check it. All of a sudden my new statment cuts for the month and my available credit is hundreds less....basically it never registered or showed the charges against my credit line, almost like it was trying to fake me out into thinking I had more limit available than I did and trying to get me to go over the limit.

Is this something that they do? Whats the deal?

[Anonymous]

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@shane82388 wrote:

So I have the classic Crapital One Platinum card with the toy credit limit of $500 and I noticed soemthing strange with it that was going on....

So i had about $100 balace or so at the beginning of august and i made some charges on it and stuff during the month, but the entire time my "available credit" said $400 whenever i logged in to check it. All of a sudden my new statment cuts for the month and my available credit is hundreds less....basically it never registered or showed the charges against my credit line, almost like it was trying to fake me out into thinking I had more limit available than I did and trying to get me to go over the limit.

Is this something that they do? Whats the deal?

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This happened to me once in a while back when my $500CL US Bank was my only card.  Luckily I kind of kept track of purchases in my head so I noticed when something was fishy before my due date.  I called US Bank and they gave me the pending amount over the phone and I just paid that even though it was more than what my online account was showing.

I think it has something to do with charges not posting for whatever reason.  Could be because of the holiday.

[shane82388]

yeah but the thing is these were from the beginning of the month and i hadnt used ti for weeks...adn the charges were posting in the account history section....and on Mint.com....

sketchy...

[Anonymous]

IMO it's probably just a posting error on the online account.  Now, if you call them and they can't verify the purchases/charges you know you made several days/weeks ago then that's pretty sketchy.

[Anonymous]

Did you happen to get gas for your car during this time? When I just received my card a few weeks ago I filled up a tank of gas as well as bought groceries and went out to eat. I checked my account online everyday just to see how things work and how the pending transactions, posted transactions, balance, and credit limit worked with each other and for a few days I noticed my available credit was quite a bit lower than it should have been. I also had a payment for the previous month's statement balance in there, which was just the annual fee. After adding things up it looked like my payment was counting against my available credit and that made no sense, shouldn't it be the other way around? I make a payment and my available credit should go up. Well I noticed after doing the math the missing amount of my available credit was exactly the same as the amount I spent on gas, so basically the gas had already posted, and it was double counting against my credit limit.

Was a little screwy but I understand that gas pumps will take more of your available credit than the actual price you pay. After a few days it cleared up and now my balance plus my available credit now equals my credit limit.

[Walt_K]

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@Anonymous wrote:

Did you happen to get gas for your car during this time? When I just received my card a few weeks ago I filled up a tank of gas as well as bought groceries and went out to eat. I checked my account online everyday just to see how things work and how the pending transactions, posted transactions, balance, and credit limit worked with each other and for a few days I noticed my available credit was quite a bit lower than it should have been. I also had a payment for the previous month's statement balance in there, which was just the annual fee. After adding things up it looked like my payment was counting against my available credit and that made no sense, shouldn't it be the other way around? I make a payment and my available credit should go up. Well I noticed after doing the math the missing amount of my available credit was exactly the same as the amount I spent on gas, so basically the gas had already posted, and it was double counting against my credit limit.

Was a little screwy but I understand that gas pumps will take more of your available credit than the actual price you pay. After a few days it cleared up and now my balance plus my available credit now equals my credit limit.

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Good point about gas.  I've found that they typically put holds on the account now for $85-100.  But OP is having the opposite problem.  More available credit than he should have, not less. 

I'm going to guess it's a simple IT problem.  Maybe alert them to it.  As much as I don't like Cap One, I doubt they are trying to trick their customers into going over their limits.

[Anonymous]

I'm actually having this problem again with my US Bank card.  Bought something about 3 weeks ago and it still hasn't popped up on my online statement but when I called them the CSR said she could see the purchase.  Definitely appears to be an issue with IT.

Also, as far as gas goes, the first time I noticed AMEX does a $100 hold I thought it was a mistake.  I was a little annoyed until I found out it's normal policy