Feel sick: 32-year-old account cancelled when autopay ended and $8 balance ended in charge off

[Watchmann]

Not much to add, I have all of my cards on autopay and I check them all online a few times a month so I know what's coming for payments.  If you had seen the $8 charge wasn't paid you could have rectified the situation.  Life happens, it's not the end of the world.

[Citylights18]

If I were you I'd go to another issuer. Get into cash reward debit cards or something else.

Crypto.com has a nice set of cards. They raised the price to a 30k CRO for a stake in the 5% cashback everything card. That seems way too high at this point, even if you are bullish on CRO.

https://crypto.com/en/cards.html

If you're staking period is over and the previous staking requirement was 250,000 ($15,000) now all of the sudden you'll have to put another $15,000 in to keep the same benefits, if not more if you bought high and the value went down.

[JR_TX]

So Sorry to hear about what happened OP. 

I'm only saying this to serve as a reminder to all of us that autopay is only effective and can be relied upon 99% of the time. Unfortunately your situation falls into the 1% that can be catastrophic! 

Autopay doesn't mean forget and never check. It needs at least a monthly double-checking and monitoring to avoid such an incident!

Luckily for you, 760 is still a stronger than most outcome so don't fret so much since there's nothing you can do now but to learn from it and keep it from ever happening again.

[longtimelurker]

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@JR_TX wrote:

So Sorry to hear about what happened OP. 

I'm only saying this to serve as a reminder to all of us that autopay is only effective and can be relied upon 99% of the time. Unfortunately your situation falls into the 1% that can be catastrophic! 
Much like what happened to the Boeing 737 MAX where the autopilot needed an experienced human (pilot) intervention to override it and avoid a catastrophic failure.

autopay doesn't mean forget and never check. It needs at least a monthly double-checking and monitoring to avoid such an incident!

Luckily for you, 760 is still a stronger than most outcome so don't fret so much since there's nothing you can do now but to learn from it and keep it from ever happening again.

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Yes, but as a defender of auto-pay, this isn't exactly a classic case of auto-pay fails.   Citi sent notices about the change, unfortunately to an unused email, so in some sense, unknown to the OP, auto-pay wasn't meant to work at that point, and, quite correctly, it didn't!   So  more ensure contact info is correct and monitor communications, rather than constantly checking auto-pay.  

[Anonymous]

Let me start with, thank you so much OP for sharing your story and your situation with everyone here!  You gave insight to many of us of what could possibly happen during a "perfect storm".  Others have already commented on what options you have left to attempt to reverse your situation, and the best you could hope for would be to contact a supervisor or officer of Citi, tell them your story, and hope they might help you.  Outside of that, as others have already said, you already refinanced your mortgage and still have a great FICO score that will only increase once again over time.  The only real thing that is hurting is the mistake that was made.

In saying all that, I'm sure you have new safeguards in place so that this never happens again.  And for others, maybe they might make some changes so it doesn't happen to them also.  Kudos to you for warning all of us of the possible dangers out there.  As for myself, I am thankful that the safeguards I already have in place protect me from this kind of outcome.

Safeguards:

• Most email programs allow you to add multiple accounts to them.  On my iPhone and on my MacBook Pro, I have all my email accounts + my wife's account on them so I'm always in the know on what is going on.
• I usually check all of my credit card and bank accounts every 2 weeks.  At the very least, once a month, but usually every 2 weeks.  I do this because I want to make sure there are no fraudulent charges and I love seeing the balances at zero. I'd rather discover an issue early on than put it off for too long. I personally use autopay more as a fail-safe in case anything ever happened to my ability to check within 2-4 weeks.  It does make you wonder what was their reasoning to stop the autopay in your case?  Did their terms of service change and what exactly changed within that legal agreement?  Just knowing that a ToS can change at any given time is reason enough for myself to check all accounts at LEAST once a month just-in-case.

Outside of those safeguards, I'm also a minimalist.  I believe having the least amount of accounts possible for exactly what you need (to maximize benefits) is best for those of us that check their accounts 1-2x per month.  If you have a huge number of accounts (imagine someone having over 30 credit cards), it would be a pain to manage all of those accounts, check on the accounts once a month, and make at least 1 charge on each of them every so often.  I see you also appear to take this minimalist approach, so the only issue was not monitoring old email accounts and not checking your accounts at least once a month.

[PullingMeSoftly]

@Anonymous  Just want to offer an anecdote of consolation to help you feel better. The good news is that you learned something from your experience and you are now all the wiser. 

I, on the other hand, screwed myself out of one of my oldest accounts by my own decision, ouch! Just at the start of some aggressive account pursuits and sprees, I had two cards issued by my local credit union (Provident). One was an old graduated card that was about 20+ years old, and the other is the current card I hold from them now. That older card was not eligible for any CLI's, was bucketed at 4.5k, and was actually supposed to have been closed when I opened the current card. Near the end of 2019, I wanted to pursue a large CLI on my current card, and negotiated an increase to 25k, but at the expense of closing the older card. I agreed to close the card! Ohhhh that hurts just typing that. Lost a 20+ year tradeline and I don't even use the current card much due to the paltry 1.5% earning rate (just a monthly utility bill). Also, having Fidelity, the Penfed PCR, and AOD all make using a 1.5% card useless for me.

So, even though this doesn't have anything to do with the circumstances you've described pertaining to your account closure, at least you didn't actively pursue the closure yourself! Even though I'll still be kicking myself for the error in judgment, it was still a learning experience.

[Anonymous]

Thanks, FinStar, for your reply. I'm not sure I understand what you mean by: 

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"especially if there was an opportunity at some point last year to re-age it before the charge-off occurred."

I'm not fully understanding the "re-age it" part. Do you just mean not have it cancelled by having paid off that $8, hence having kept the 32-year account?

[Aim_High]

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@Anonymous wrote:

Thanks, FinStar, for your reply. I'm not sure I understand what you mean by: 

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"especially if there was an opportunity at some point last year to re-age it before the charge-off occurred."

I'm not fully understanding the "re-age it" part. Do you just mean not have it cancelled by having paid off that $8, hence having kept the 32-year account?

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I'm not @FinStar but will try to explain since he hasn't had time to reply yet. 

The Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) establishes an "age" for derogatory information based on a date of first delinquency when the account first become 30 days past due (AND) no further payments were subsequently made.  The act requires that information to be deleted from your report when it ages off at 7.5 years (7 years plus 180-days from delinquency.)    If you make payments on a debt, it is legally "re-aged" and the delinquency may stay on your report longer as the account continues to report delinquent.  (In other words, let's say someone owed $800 instead of your $8 and had to pay it off in several installments.)   That's why we sometimes advise members who have a large past due balance that is far overdue but not yet charged off that it might be best to not start repaying.  That allows the creditor to re-age the debt and you may keep the information on your credit report longer. 

Once a debt has been charged off or sent to collections, it cannot legally be re-aged (although this sometimes happens.) 

What FinStar was talking about was the window between when the account went 30 days late and before Citi charged it off.  You could have voluntarily re-aged it but possibly kept the account open by doing so.  You might have even been able to get Citi to remove all the related derogatory information.   For example, your charge that started the situation was in March 2020.  It first went delinquent in April 2020.  Citi charged off and closed your account in September 2020.  The FCRA date of first delinquency clock would have started in April.  Citi continued to report the account delinquent on your credit report from April to September, but it would fall off your reports based on the April date.  If you contacted Citi in August to make payment, it would have reaged the debt since you made a payment on a delinquency.   

[randomguy1]

OP,  that your account wsa canceled and the things you are dealing with. The only thing I can recommend is changing the alerts on all your credit cards. When payment is past due, I set that particular alert to email me, perform a push notification, AND text me. With most bank apps you can do this, Citibank included. I don't have alerts going to 3 different methods for everything, but payment past due is something that I do set that on. If you're late and pay within 30 days, it will not hit your credit card but you will most likely have to pay a late fee (which has the possibility of getting waived).

I suggest everyone to take advantage of technology and review their account alerts on all their credit cards. 

[Anonymous]

Another way to monitor is if your checking account has the ability to track external accounts. I use Ally Bank and I have the ability to link all my external accounts - including credit cards - in their Account Tracking feature which pulls in all the latest balances when you log in (sometimes you need to refresh). This does not replace logging into external accounts altogether, but it really is a great tool.