topic Re: Weird, auto-reduction in CC APR - First Tech CU in Credit Cards

Weird, auto-reduction in CC APR - First Tech CU

Revelate — Fri, 27 Jul 2018 20:39:27 GMT

Just got an email on this, admittedly strange in my experience and oddly this is after I had a dumbass credit snafu which wound up with a 30D late on Experian... and TBH I've never once swiped this card either as I got it for C+P and then never had a use for it when I went overseas.

Dear Revelate,

Congratulations! You’ve been taking care of your credit and it shows. Because of your great work, we’re thrilled to let you know that we’ve lowered your Annual Percentage Rate (APR) Rewards on your First Tech Mastercard, listed below. This decrease will take place beginning with your next billing cycle, so you won’t have to wait too long to see your hard work pay off.

First Tech Credit Card	Former APR	New APR
Platinum Rewards Master Card	13.49%	11.49%

Re: Weird, auto-reduction in CC APR - First Tech CU

Dave4fun — Fri, 27 Jul 2018 20:57:52 GMT

Thats great! Maybe they are trying to encourage you to use their card. Congrats!

Re: Weird, auto-reduction in CC APR - First Tech CU

Revelate — Sat, 28 Jul 2018 03:27:14 GMT

@Dave4fun wrote:
Thats great! Maybe they are trying to encourage you to use their card. Congrats!

Yeah, interestingly enough other than my HELOC this APR is now the lowest of any tradeline I have: my Penfed PLOC ticked up to 12% sometime.

Will be interesting to see what happens with this account assuming the Fed raises rates again after seeing the godlike GDP number... but I need to go find my PIN and make a swipe now as I actually have a reason to keep it open as my low APR card at this point and it would be a shame for it to be closed for inactivity.

Re: Weird, auto-reduction in CC APR - First Tech CU

Anonymous — Sat, 28 Jul 2018 09:12:54 GMT

Revelate ... remember when you got this card and had all of us considering whether we needed a Chip & Pin Card. Then you don't use it and come back here and report a 30D late and a lower Apr The shame of it all Time for you to go to the corner (almost thought we were going to have another Oregon Community Credit Union OCCU with the Beaver Card run when you applied ... noticed their name included "Community" interesting as I did not remember that ... maybe just maybe you can start another fiasco? )!

Re: Weird, auto-reduction in CC APR - First Tech CU

Revelate — Sat, 28 Jul 2018 14:06:25 GMT

@Anonymous wrote:
Revelate ... remember when you got this card and had all of us considering whether we needed a Chip & Pin Card. Then you don't use it and come back here and report a 30D late and a lower Apr The shame of it all Time for you to go to the corner (almost thought we were going to have another Oregon Community Credit Union OCCU with the Beaver Card run when you applied ... noticed their name included "Community" interesting as I did not remember that ... maybe just maybe you can start another fiasco? )!

Haha, yeah well I kinda doubt that.

APR reduction is kinda /shrug unless you carry balances which we hardcore preach not to do on this forum.

Where C+P falls down in my personal experience (YMMV), is it's yet one more PIN you have to remember, and if you have a bunch of cards and they all have PIN's, bleck; admittedly I could ask if I could switch it to some other number but this whole send PIN's on paper in mail for everything from cards to the Cali tax board portal (and you have to use it within a certain time period no less on that one) is a pretty annoying method of solving it.

I think the forum came to the right conclusion then, that C+P wasn't really relevant in the US and I saw it nowhere in my Asia tour. If projects hadn't gotten shutdown maybe it would've seen some use in Germany.

And I suspect people will come to the correct conclusion now: if you need a low APR, you can get one better than this one by a few percentage points. That said, none of my creditors blinked with that 30D late, apparently it was a non-event in their opinions. Amex, Barclays, BOFA, Cap 1, Chase, Citi, DCU, Elan, First Tech, and Penfed... all simply disregarded it, so to be fair this was probably just some automated process that First Tech does and who knows what their algorithm is on that.

Guess we've come a long way from when I started where everyone was spooked about even the most trivial of blemishes (inquiries) and today even a deliquency and a change in payment patterns is *shrug* from a lender's perspective.