I'm new to the forum but thought I would share my longest, most infuriating CC story here.
Basically, my first CC in my life I signed up for was in freshman year of college, back in the early 1990s -- a Citibank. I forget the exact name, but some kind of 'platinum for students' card. Back in those days of low CL, poor judgment, and personal check + snail mail payments, I had a couple 30-60 day late payments. Nothing else bad (no collections, no BK, etc.). In good standing besides those few late payments in the early years. Fast forward almost 10 years when I'm now in professional school. Back in those days of telemarketing, you would often get calls from banks trying to sell you products, including CCs. So Citi called and persuaded me to switch my Citi card to a new Sony co-branded CC. Unfortunately I agreed, and it became a Sony Card.
A few years later, the Sony card account was sold/transferred to another bank (Household or Bank 1 or something I can't recall), and boy was I p*ssed! Primarily because I thought that I would lose my credit history for that card, which was my oldest card -- about 10 years old at that point. It turns out that the history transfers of course, so I was okay in that regards, but still I lose my length of history at one company (like I still have with Discover, where they mention everytime I call "and thank you for being with us since 199_."). I never knew that a card account could just be sold or transferred to another bank, and I think I'll always be a bit unhappy about losing my long history with Citi.
Anyway, in the ensuing years, the card goes through several banks, the last two being Chase and now Capital One. Everyone hates Capital One (except for when rebuilding) of course, and in less than a year I'm beginning to see why. Cap One makes you jump through all sorts of hoops (well, they makes you send in a cancelled personal check and application to sign up for autopay from your checking account -- which can get declined by Cap One even) to get such a basic feature like autopay. They also declined my request for CLI from $6900. I had even paid off a $4000 balance on that card but to no avail. The one good thing about Cap One is the no foreign transaction fee, which will come in handy in the coming years as I travel more internationally. One thing that does worry me about Cap One is their reputation for doing unreasonable account closures, which would be the worst case scenario for me with this card.
Still, I hate the instability that seems to come with having a co-branded CC. In the last ten years, I think my Sony Card has transferred between four banks (although some were due to mergers/acquisitions) which is really not acceptable IMO. I never use this card almost ever, and plan to keep it only for the history (my 1st CC -- I'll keep it 'till I die) and the no foreign transaction fee. Ideally, at this point I want to transfer it from being a co-branded card to a non-cobranded card (e.g. from Sony Card to some ordinary, non-cobranded CC). I read from another thread that it may be harder to get a bank to transfer a co-branded CC, does anyone have experience with this kind of transfer? I'm not sure I want to transfer it to Cap One (I really should have tried this last year when it was with Chase), but I would hate for it to transfer in the future to an even worse bank (or is there not really any worse bank?). I guess I could always just call and ask...
Any thoughts/suggestions would be great, thanks!
