Two months ago, DH was approved for the Oddyssey card at 35K and 9.9% (or 12%, can't rememeber). Anyway, we have had issuesw with making the first two monthly payments and just learned something that I thought others might want to know. In order to pay your credit card you can not use an external account, it can only be paid via a First Tech account. We learned this when trying to pay the 24K bill this month with our exteral business account. Not only that, but when we tried to pay the full amount we were told it would be treated as a cash advance and that there would be a fee. Now I know that is bull, but the other employees were busy so we opted to just pay the minimum and get out of there. Sigh, I am VERY dissapointed in our credit union. They have been our primary bank for the last 30-40 years...not a happy camper. It is crazy that we need to transfer money from our external account into our personal account and then pay the credit card. That is going to screw up the business book keeping and look messy!
Anyway, just wanted to share so others might be able to know this in advance. Good luck people!
EDIT: Solution was to set up and use bill pay and the cash fee info we were given was incorrect. Update and more info is in a reply below where we updated the end result/solution.
@QCS123 wrote:Two months ago, DH was approved for the Oddyssey card at 35K and 9.9% (or 12%, can't rememeber). Anyway, we have had issuesw with making the first two monthly payments and just learned something that I thought others might want to know. In order to pay your credit card you can not use an external account, it can only be paid via a First Tech account. We learned this when trying to pay the 24K bill this month with our exteral business account. Not only that, but when we tried to pay the full amount we were told it would be treated as a cash advance and that there would be a fee. Now I know that is bull, but the other employees were busy so we opted to just pay the minimum and get out of there. Sigh, I am VERY dissapointed in our credit union. They have been our primary bank for the last 30-40 years...not a happy camper. It is crazy that we need to transfer money from our external account into our personal account and then pay the credit card. That is going to screw up the business book keeping and look messy!
Anyway, just wanted to share so others might be able to know this in advance. Good luck people!
I have several credit unions that do this, and it is extremely annoying. I can't imagine how they think they're helping themselves with that.
@CreditCuriosity wrote:Can't you just push a payment if you can't pull a payment with them?
Yes, and it's basically what you have to do with credit unions like that. But it's extremely annoying.
All of a sudden I'm not so eager to get a First Tech credit card.
Direct deposit relationships (providing the means for funding the internal account used to make payments on said CC) should add perks or preferential treatment to customers who do - but it should not be the only method allowed to make payments.
How many people do they fleece with fees and "gotchas" like this?
UPDATE:
We went in to talk to them about this because it just seems cray to not be able to pay from an external account and learned that you can use bill pay to pay the credit card. Bill pay was a breeze, so that is solved and now it's no big deal. Also the cash advance was bull, it was just an employee giving us incorrect info. ( I think they got in trouble for that one, oops). So we were able to pay the 24K bill super easy once it was set up.
I also spoke with their IT tech team and they are working on settting up external payments for their credit card, so that will happen down the road, just no known end date for this to be completed.
Now feeling better about the credit union again, especially since the Odyssey is such a great card.
Glad to hear they are working on getting updated so you can pay the CC from an external account. I also have a card from Vantage West credit union and you can tell they use the same online banking platform and I can pay their CC from an external account so I wasn't sure why first tech wouldn't allow that. Found out the hard way after getting it and have to admit I don't put much spend on it because of that, just complicates payment.
The cash advance fee didn't make much sense to me I'd never even heard of a bank doing that for a payment, glad they got that sorted for you, too.
Still on the fence about using their rewards program for $1k direct deposit and 20 CC transactions per month that gets you better rates on checking/savings, $10$ streaming credit and +.5% back on the CC.
