Lesson Learned: Push your credit card payments (Chase closed my account)

[Anonymous]

---

@trusty wrote:

I'm thoroughly aghast to read about so many otherwise savvy consumers giving ACH pull authorization out. That's just not sound practice, for a variety of reasons. If you do give out ACH pull auth... it better only be for a backup checking account. But, even in this case... as all "set it and forget it" ideas, they oftentimes encounter unexpected hiccups; like when the bank grossly miscalculates your payment, causing you to be late on several other accounts, as well.

I push payments, 100% of the time. If I forget to make a payment, at least I know it's on me. I will never ever give anyone access to pull monies out of my account. I didn't even have to learn my lesson... I've just had the benefit of reading extensively about unforeseen situations that others have found themselves in, oftentimes through no fault of their own... other than having payments being automatically pulled. That's the one common theme in the hiccups.

If you push pay... you know you have the money at the precise time that you send it. All the better if they receive it electronically, instead of by paper check, in which case something could still happen to the funds in the account, in the meantime, while you're waiting for them to receive the check and process it.

In the end, there will always be a time when an error occurs. This is where the digital age is not good. It used to be enough to walk into a branch and they would easily understand that fraud has side effects, and not take adverse action over it. But, when all they see is a number, they lose the human touch.

I had something bogus show up on my reports once, and I encountered adverse action before it was even cleared up. Did I get that account back, due to that terrible error? Take a wild guess. It's the breaks.

---

Honestly, it never even occurred to me to push out the payments. I don't think I've ever used my bank's billpay in all my 16 years of banking. It's strange because I must have missed the massive amounts of advice on here to push payments, as now that I've had this problem, I see the same advice in many, many threads that I know I have read. I've got it all set up now. No more mishaps... or at least... fewer ones?

[bourgogne]

---

---

I am going to let this go as you are not going to get my drift.  if you came up on the chase radar for any reason its a negative.  they dont send out fruit baskets for being on-time.  and again I will say that they can often be reasoned with.  I helped a woman get 4 cards with them last year and she was shut down and then reopened because they are often decent to reason with.  that said there are many factors in play all the time and within your profile it could have been something else they did not like.  chase is sensitive to exposure and god knows what other factors.  if you think you can paint a good story then get it in front of the right person and see what happens.

---

I get your drift. I'm not saying a returned payment isn't a negative. It is. But you're saying it's the same as paying late, when it's not. If the payment is instantly replaced, it's clear that it was a mistake and not meant to get extra spend that couldn't be accounted for. It's frustrating when people like you pop up to play devil's advocate like Chase is perfectly justified, when I never stated they weren't. There's nothing to advocate here for, as I already said it was my fault and I learned a lesson. I'd just prefer to spend my money with institutions who understand when I send them a copy of a police report to explain the returns, have a good history with them, and no negative marks on my credit over nearly 7 years. They were the last card I got, and there doesn't appear to be any AR from them on any CB, so I doubt my spread had anything to do with the closure. I chose to put all those items on that card, instead of my NFCU, and I'm regretting it now. I don't hate Chase or anything, they are just a bank, but like I said, the circumstances around the returns were out of my control, and it's frustrating that if I want to stay a Chase customer, I'd have to try even harder than I already have to get it back.

---

paying late = negative.  returned payment = negative.  that is what I am saying.  I know no good story ever started with "I had the best salad..." but your story is hard to follow for me.  some dba, that you actually know, stole your unencrypted data and the cops are in hot pursuit.  come on, this is a page turner lol.  but really, if you can lay out a concise story you can fix this, the ball is in your court

[Anonymous]

I understand the overall concept; if you have multiple pulls from your checking account hit while your account is being hacked, you'll have problems. Personally, I have all of my CC accounts autopull the statement balance on the due date. You're making me a little nervous about that. OTOH, the idea of managing monthly billpay for all of my CC accounts (45 of them) and making sure the amount and payment date are correct each month makes my head hurt. It makes me think I have a much better chance of messing something up and ending up with a late payment that way than the likelihood of checking account fraud.

Now, not trying to blame the victim here, but I'm having a little trouble understanding the details of your story. You apparently have one Chase CC for which there were three returned payments. So apparently either:
1. You didn't notice for a long time that your checking account had been drained, or
2. You did notice that your checking account had been drained, but neglected to change future scheduled pulls from that account, or
3. You had multiple pulls for the same Chase CC account in such a short amount of time that you were unable to stop them once you saw what was going on.

So which of those was it, or was it something else?

If #1, you need to pay more attention. If #2, you need to be more proactive. If #3, you need to question why you're doing that. Skittish lenders have been known to close accounts just for too many payments in a month, not even with any returned.

Perhaps a better title would be "Lesson learned: Avoid doing multiple pulls for the same CC account in a month"

Why not just set up an indefinite autopayment pull for each card for the statement balance on the due date and call it a day? One pull for each account per month, period. Set up for each account, once and done.  Simple.  Why make things complex with multiple payments?

If something goes wonky with the checking account, set up and fund a new checking account and change all of your autopulls to the new account. If you catch it right away, you'd at most have one payment to one lender returned. Not a big deal, IME. I guess if you had multiple cards with the same due date, then you might have more than one payment returned, and maybe with bad enough luck, multiple payments to the same lender for different CC's.

But multiple payments returned for the same card? Something smells pretty fishy about that to me, and apparently to your lender too.

Chris.

[bourgogne]

---

@Anonymous wrote:

I understand the overall concept; if you have multiple pulls from your checking account hit while your account is being hacked, you'll have problems. Personally, I have all of my CC accounts autopull the statement balance on the due date. You're making me a little nervous about that. OTOH, the idea of managing monthly billpay for all of my CC accounts (45 of them) and making sure the amount and payment date are correct each month makes my head hurt. It makes me think I have a much better chance of messing something up and ending up with a late payment that way than the likelihood of checking account fraud.

Now, not trying to blame the victim here, but I'm having a little trouble understanding the details of your story. You apparently have one Chase CC for which there were three returned payments. So apparently either:
1. You didn't notice for a long time that your checking account had been drained, or
2. You did notice that your checking account had been drained, but neglected to change future scheduled pulls from that account, or
3. You had multiple pulls for the same Chase CC account in such a short amount of time that you were unable to stop them once you saw what was going on.

So which of those was it, or was it something else?

If #1, you need to pay more attention. If #2, you need to be more proactive. If #3, you need to question why you're doing that. Skittish lenders have been known to close accounts just for too many payments in a month, not even with any returned.

Perhaps a better title would be "Lesson learned: Avoid doing multiple pulls for the same CC account in a month"

Why not just set up an indefinite autopayment pull for each card for the statement balance on the due date and call it a day? One pull for each account per month, period. Set up for each account, once and done.  Simple.  Why make things complex with multiple payments?

If something goes wonky with the checking account, set up and fund a new checking account and change all of your autopulls to the new account. If you catch it right away, you'd at most have one payment to one lender returned. Not a big deal, IME. I guess if you had multiple cards with the same due date, then you might have more than one payment returned, and maybe with bad enough luck, multiple payments to the same lender for different CC's.

But multiple payments returned for the same card? Something smells pretty fishy about that to me, and apparently to your lender too.

Chris.

---

the word "fishy" is not allowed on this forum.  lol.  I cannot get my head around using more than a few cards but that aside if you are paying everything ON the due date, well then its just a matter of time.  really.  I cannot figure out the story either which is probably the reason it happened.  simple works really well in credit

[UpperNwGuy]

It appears to me that this story isn't so much about pushing and pulling as it is about how many times a credit card is paid per month, timing of monthly payment, and whether or not auto payments are a good idea.

[kshurika]

Uhhhhhh, if you don't mind my asking, what's a "push"? What's a "pull"?

[bourgogne]

---

@kshurika wrote:
Uhhhhhh, if you don't mind my asking, what's a "push"? What's a "pull"?

---

push if from checking, pull if from the portal

[kshurika]

And the "portal" isssss...?

[bourgogne]

---

@kshurika wrote:
And the "portal" isssss...?

---

any web site

[kshurika]

Okay, so Amazon charging my CC is a pull, right? My insurance company taking my monthly payment out of my checking account is a push, right?