!@#$%^&* Citi Closed $15,000 Card Due to Inactivity

[NRB525]

Sorry to hear OP, never fun when a card is closed. 

Not it sure how long it went without any usage, but this is another example why I think it is a very bad idea to cut up any active card. If cardholders want to close the account because it is not useful, fine, but as long as the account is live, and until a replacement card is activated, life is a lot easier and more predictable when you have the card. 

[Anonymous]

Wow I'd be extremely upset as well. Did you get this incident escalated to a manager?

[CreditDunce]

I would be outraged, too.  Perhaps you could have pushed $1 payment while waiting for a new card, but I wouldn't have thought Citi would close a card so quickly.

[Anonymous]

We'll know better if the OP gets back with us.  One thing I forgot to ask him was about whether he had ever used this credit card.  On the one hand, he writes:

"I did not use the card much - but - I did use it for Easy Deals magazine subscriptions..."

But on the other hand he also writes:

"... there was never usage on the account..."

I am guessing that the word "never" means "not since I last used the card some number of months ago."

Here's my guess as to what happened.  It's probably an issue of the left hand not knowing what the right hand was doing, which is a teachable moment any time you are dealing with a huge company (as Citi is).  There was one group inside Citi that is responsible for sending out new cards.  Call them the Card Senders.  Then there is another team that reviews accounts that have not been used in a while -- call them the Inactivity Police.  Citi's IP group merely saw that a lot of time was going by with no use on a card that was still open.  They didn't realize that the OP had been in touch with the Card Senders.  But once the card had been closed it looks like there was no way to reopen that particular card since it was a legacy card (no longer being offered through VISA).

Obviously this all still bites for our OP, and I am sure we're all sympathetic.  "So sorry for your loss" as they say in the helping professions (and in funeral parlors)....

[austinguy907]

I always find it kind of funny how some CCC's deal with inactivity.  

Macy's will drop your CL to $100 after an extended period of non-use

Citi will give you 12 months of non-use and then send you a letter 30 days out from closure

Chase.... BOA... WF.... who knows

Comenity will approve you, let you use it for a purchase, and then shut it down before it gets to your mailbox

Synch.... 22-24 months and then they just close it if you don't use it... .no real decline in CL prior to that for those of us that have alerts for CL changes.... 

Rest of the bunch can do the same but they're not really mentioned around here.

I think I would opt for the CLD to $100 for non-use and keep the account open... if you want to use it again then just hit the CLI and it gets restored for 6 months or until you go dormant again for a period of time.  $100 doesn't do much for those trying to buffer but, it keeps the age and history "active" until there's a status change.  $100 also drops the liability for the CCC if there's a leak of info during the dormancy.  

[yfan]

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@Anonymous wrote:

We'll know better if the OP gets back with us.  One thing I forgot to ask him was about whether he had ever used this credit card.  On the one hand, he writes:

"I did not use the card much - but - I did use it for Easy Deals magazine subscriptions..."

But on the other hand he also writes:

"... there was never usage on the account..."

I am guessing that the word "never" means "not since I last used the card some number of months ago."

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Not necessarily. The way Citi Easy Deals works, you can make payments using ANY Citi card, not necessarily the one that gave you access to Easy Deals.

[NRB525]

The Citi EasyDeals I have used are a paper cert you print and hand to the merchant for your discount, and you pay with whatever card you want, Citi or otherwise. 

[yfan]

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@NRB525 wrote:

The Citi EasyDeals I have used are a paper cert you print and hand to the merchant for your discount, and you pay with whatever card you want, Citi or otherwise. 

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For the coupons, yes. But I'm talking about buying merchandise, subscriptions or gift cards directly on Easy Deals. Those require payment on the EasyDeals site, and for that you must use a Citi card.

[Anonymous]

I have three Citi cards and yet I knew nothing about Easy Deals or how they work.  My usual state of blissful ignorance.  Thanks for teaching me something, guys.

Well, it sounds like the OP may be correct when he says there was never activity on the card..  If so that is certainly consistent with the case studies I collected a while back.  I.e. when a card has never been used even once then it can be closed due to inactivity much sooner.

Every case study where the card had been used at least once but was still closed due to inacivity involved a minimum of 13 months of inactivity -- typically more like 15 or more -- with a tiny number of exceptions at month 8, but these were confined exclusively to Wells Fargo.  Many people also volunteered cases of major credit cards that had gone 2 or 3 years with no account closure.  And store cards could apparently go really long without closure.

The best practice guidelines I concluded were:

*  When you open a new card, be sure to activate it and then use it once fairly promptly. 

After that....

*  To prevent a store card from being closed, using it once a year is more than adequate.  Once every two years is probably 98% safe.

*  To prevent a major card from being closed, using it every six months is more than adequate.  Once a year is probably 98% safe, unless it is a Wells Fargo card or if it is one of your oldest cards (where it being closed could be a very bad thing).

[NRB525]

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@yfan wrote:

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@NRB525 wrote:

The Citi EasyDeals I have used are a paper cert you print and hand to the merchant for your discount, and you pay with whatever card you want, Citi or otherwise. 

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For the coupons, yes. But I'm talking about buying merchandise, subscriptions or gift cards directly on Easy Deals. Those require payment on the EasyDeals site, and for that you must use a Citi card.

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True enough, but it is not necessary to utilize all the possible types of EasyDeals to say one has used EasyDeals consistently