Hi all! New here to the forums! If this isn't the right place, feel free to move it. I've been working this past year on improving my credit scores and finally started improving! I was approved for $5000 cl with chase freedom and $3000 for discover it. Very happy as I'd worked hard at paying down my balances and not applying for new credit these last 2 years. Anyway, we recently had 2 expensive things come up in the last month, which pretty much wiped out our rainy day fund and left only enough cash to pay bills and eat. No big deal...we were glad we didn't have to go into debt for these emergencies. And then along came Hurricane Irma. (I live in so. Fla but as far west as you can get which is about 90'miles from Naples.) Naturally we procrastinated stocking up on hurricane supplies, so we needed to get lots of water, batteries, etc. the cc came at the perfect time as payday was the following week and this wasnt in my budget. So I stocked up on supplies and really needed cash in case there was no power after so I tried to take $200 in cash advance, planning on depositing the cash and paying it immediately if we didn't need to use it. It was a brand new card so the activity was flagged and I had to speak to their fraud department. No big deal, spoke to them, explained why the odd usage, verified what I needed to and got my cash. Tried to continue to buy what we needed...everything was out so I had to visit multiple stores just to get enough...but literally every other time I tried to use it, it would get flagged. 4 times between the day before the storm and immediately after. I had to take an extra 15 min just to clear everything up each time! While I totally appreciate the close monitoring and understand my activity was odd (I'd also just added my husband as a user as we always do on our ccs) it just felt excessive because 1 guy even asks if I'd be making more purchases and said he'd clear it so it wouldn't happen again...that was only the second time. So now the storm has passed and with only the loss of trees, some water getting in through a glass door that was shuttered, we got through it just fine...many of my folks at work are still without power, we have been very lucky. So now the money has been deposited and a payment made for all but $50. I really hope I never have to use a brand new cc like that in an emergency again! Hope anyone who was in the path of this storm is ok! This was scary....we were on the "dirty side" and had so many tornado warnings...don't want to go through that again!
