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Unless your terms are different than mine, the minimum payment is actually 2%.
I thought it was 2% too, but this is what BECU Customer Service said to me in their message:
"
Thank you for contacting BECU through our Message Center and I am happy to provide you with information concerning your Line of Credit account. The due date for this account is always the 15th of the month. Your minimum payment amount will be $25 or 2 ½% of the balance owing, whichever is greater. Your LOC is set up on an automatic payment option to transfer your minimum payment from your checking account ending in **** on your due date each month. You will want to be sure that the funds are in your account at midnight on the night of the 14th so that they will be available when your system goes to transfer over you payment early in the morning on the 15th.
Your employer would want to set up a directly deposit to your checking account if this deposit is intended to cover your LOC payment. This will allow the funds to be in your account when your payment is due. Our system will not allow you to overpay your LOC for a credit balance, so this amount would be returned if coming from an outside source."
In any case whether it's 2% or 2.5% the savings account pays 4% interest on the first $500 so I will likely just keep $500 there, much more than the $200 or $250 the maximum payment could be, set up the PLOC to pay from the savings account, and sleep soundly knowing that it can never go wrong. That means I have to flip it from paying from the checkings account to paying from the savings account. If it were to pay from the checking account there's a risk that some check or autopay could leave me a few cents short of what BECU needs and cause problems. Flipping it over to the savings account solves everything and I'll get the 4% interest on the money there.
Obviously in the ordinary case where I'm on the ball and paying attention I'll be payinng the PLOC on the 1st of the month and not waiting until the 15th, but I like to get thinngs set up so that even if I ignore my banking, things chug along and take care of themselves automatically. I want to make the news one day for being the guy who died and nobody noticed for 10 years because my automated banking took care of all the bills. (Well, I would hope my family notices! But you get the idea.)
Some more information: I have now linked two external banks to my BECU PLOC via ACH. I did this from the remote banking systems, using their account linking web UI's to send micropayments to the BECU account. I linked both my RBC Bank account and my Bank of America account to my BECU PLOC. They were already previously linked to my BECU Checking Account. Now they're linked to both.
In the process I learned that you can only set up these links when you have a balance on the PLOC. When I first tried to link BoA to the PLOC, the micro payments never showed up. That is because the balance was $0 and BECU refused to allow it to go positive.
Then I transfered $20 from the PLOC to my checking account and tried again. This time the micropayments went through and showed as "loan payments".
It's useful to have external accounts linked directly to the PLOC in my opinion as it means if you want to transfer money in to pay the PLOC you can do it in a single operation, with an ACH transfer directly to the PLOC itself. When the payment arrives, the PLOC will be paid. You don't have to go in and see when it arrived and do another manual transfer from the checking account to the PLOC.
It does confirm what message center said, though -- you can't overpay the PLOC. I will try that later, I will see what happens if I send a $20 payment ot the PLOC when less than $20 is owing on it. See whehter I get a partial payment or the whole thing is returned or what.
Did you get a document titled Consumer Line Of Credit - Credit Voucher and Opening Disclosures via snail mail? If so, look all the way down at the bottom. It has the minimum payment terms.