Here’s to good credit
September 7, 2006 – 8:05 pmThese days, nearly every company that bills me for something offers the option of “paperless billing”, a feature I am quite fond of. No more monthly hate mail from those that you owe money to. Instead, it’s monthly hate emails. I am free to ignore the emails and only check up on things when I need to. Today I found out why this can be a bad thing.
I was poking around in the Citi Card website, checking up on the two accounts I have with them, and I clicked on my statement. This is unusual because it’s something I rarely do. It’s a good thing I did though, because right away I noticed that I was charged a $39 dollar late fee on one of my accounts. Apparently one of my payments was a bit late last month. What’s worse than that? It was only about ten hours late. I was immediately thrown into a state of depression, given that I’ve worked VERY hard for the past several years to get my credit to the point it is now; not the best, but still quite respectable.
Panicked, I grabbed my wallet and dialed the number on the back of the card. It’s a ‘Simplicity’ card from Citi, and they are always touting the “Press 0 to speak to a real person” feature. So that’s what I did and in no time at all I was speaking with Mark. Mark assured me that you have to be at least 60 days late before Citi will report you as delinquent. At this point, Mark could have called me dirty names and hung up on me and I would have been just fine with that. At ten hours, I was well within the grace period and my credit score was safe for now.
However, Mark was also kind enough to have the late fee credited to my account since I am such a good little consumer and have payed my bills on time since day one with both of my Citi accounts. I honeslty didn’t care about the late fee though. I would have gladly payed it five times over if it meant keeping that negative mark off of my credit report.
So from now on I will be checking those online statements a bit more frequently.
