@pip3man wrote:
@JoeRockhead wrote:
Some really good advice here already. Perhaps the single biggest reason people get balance chased is to prevent them from charging more to the card.
You can try to head that off, or remove that scenario from the algorithms, and signal to your lenders that your intentions to control your spending, and debt are sincere by preemptively freezing all your cards. This prevents you from using them further. Pay your balances off as you intend to do, wait for your next statement cycles to close on each card before you unfreeze that particular card.
Maybe this works for you, maybe it doesn't but, costs you nothing to try. Let us know what happens.
In the banking/credit world, things don't necessarily work the way you stated it. First of all, balance chasing is a systematic action. Sometimes a Risk analyst would manually decision an adverse action with certain accounts but the vast majority are automated. I say that to say - freezing a card will certainly NOT stall or prevent it from happening. If the account has already been shortlisted for balance chasing, that's bound to happen come rain or sunshine. Ever wondered why people still get balance chased even right after paying off an account in full? To your point, balance chasing is initiated for two reasons - to limit the credit issuers risk exposure and to prevent additional charges that could lead the balance to spiral out of control even further.
I guess I should have included a disclaimer to begin my post. Although I did say it may, or may not work... that should have been enough to negate the notion that I stated as fact on how anything works.
By your own words, the vast majority of accounts that experience the adverse action of balance chasing are the result of automated decision making (computer generated). I'd agree that IF the account has already been shortlisted for balance chasing, freezing the accounts would likely do nothing to stop it. However, we don't know whether the OP's accounts have been short listed, or not.
To answer your question, no, I don't ever wonder why people get balance chased, I know, that you know, that I already know.
I can't (and haven't) in any way claim that it will work, any more than you can claim that it will not work with any degree of certainty. It was merely a suggestion, one that costs the OP nothing to do.
