Fooled by 0% APR balance transfer

I told them they could sue me if they wanted the money. I never heard from them again.

Sorry - something isn't right here. If you took out one of those "XX days same as cash deals", the remaining balance is the payoff amount IF you paid it completely off before the deadline. That means following their rules about when they receive the money and crediting your account.

If you cut it too fine and they received the money after the deadline (even if that was before your next statement), you owe the deferred interest. Your statement about having to pay an additional $3 principal suggests you did not pay off the complete amount and they were perfectly correct in billing you the deferred interest.

This is spelled out in great detail in that fine print loan document you signed, which may or may not bear any similarity to what the sales droid told you.

For small amounts, they don't have to sue or even contact you. All they do is report the lack of payment to the credit reporting agencies and wait. Eventually they may sell your account to a collection firm.

Either way, all you are doing is hurting yourself.

Complain to your state's attorney general's office, but before doing so, examine your agreement to see that you complied with all the rules

"Google" wrote in news:ZrOdnRe5 snipped-for-privacy@comcast.com:

I don't have a leg to stand on since the guy explaining the rules to me was reading from a script. To me it was all gobbledygook (it probably was mostly that, with the essentials buried in it somewhere).

This was mostly to warn others not to fall for these traps. I could scrape together the funds to pay this "loan" off right away, but others may not have that opportunity. Once you start paying finance charges it is difficult to get out from under.

That's actually pretty standard, and no different from what other banks do. You need to make sure to use it for that loan only, unless you normally pay interest on credit cards and the rate is competitive. Since most people normally pay interest on credit cards, it's not going to be a big surprise to most people that they are paying interest on the portion other than the 0% part. And since it's standard for credit cards to charge interest if you don't pay them off in full, I'm not sure if most people would have expected there to be an exception if they did not mention one. Citibank is willing to eat the cost of financing their existing balance in order to get their new business.

The other thing that you did not mention that people need to watch out for is that the interest is waived if it's paid off within that year, but if you pay it off a day late, then you are hit with a year and a day's worth of interest, not a day's worth as some might think.

The bottom line is that you have to read the agreement. What bothers me is not things like this, but the increasingly common tactic of a company saying something untrue, and then giving a disclaimer. It used to be that companies said something promising, but there was more to it in the fine print. These days, they are apt to say something blatantly false and disclaim it.

For example, television channels are full of commercials that offer something for "only" $XXX. Then the fine print has a handling charge that's more than the value of what they are selling. If they want to rip people off, it's up to the buyers. But "only" still means "only." And if there's an additional charge, it's not "only" that amount. I see ads for HDTVs that are not HDTVs, but you need to read the disclaimer to find out that the main claim is false. And there are many more examples if you look.

In terms of financial companies, I know somebody who got a letter from Countrywide and it said "STOP SENDING CHECKS" in giant print. He signed up for the direct payment service, and stopped sending checks. You can guess what happened. Actually, perhaps you can't. They hit him with late fees since he did not pay before the service kicked in, as you might guess. But the next month, they hit him with even more late fees, even though he had gotten a letter saying that it had started, and had sent in his payment. There was even more fine print that said that if you owe more than the normal payment, NO money would be deducted automatically. Even though he had made up for the missing payment, the new late fee stopped things dead. And that was even after a rep had agreed to waive it, but it was on the books when the next payment was scheduled.

You can say he didn't read the whole thing, but he did exactly what it said. I might not have done that, but even intelligent people sometimes miss what's in fine print. That's especially true when their way of doing things is atypical such as normally paying off credit cards in full each month. Years later, one of my mortgages got purchased by Countrywide. They sent me a "stop sending checks" envelope, and it was more misleading than I would have expected from the story I had heard. Obviously, complaints got them to change nothing.

"Wai Doan Hsu" wrote in news:1146870875.085885.229300 @i39g2000cwa.googlegroups.com:

Sorry for snipping your excellent explanations.

I am not used to be made a fool of (like this time by Citibank), and that's what happened.

In fact, I experienced that charges, made according to the letter of an agreement, waived when I explained what had happened. For instance, it was not clear to me that Discover was going to take 3 months or more to make the switch to automatic payments of the outstanding balance. They hit me with late fees and charges. I explained that I didn't realize that it would take so long, and had not seen any letter explaining that fact. They waived/refunded all the charges, and it didn't take much convincing. Ok, so they might have thought that my business was worth something.