I thought about posting this on some credit card review sites, but I couldn’t find any that looked popular/reputable. We finally canceled our account today after getting burned by their higher-than-normal fees one too many times. Let me put this plainly: if you’re the type of person who never screws up their accounts and always keeps everything in check, this is probably a fantastic card to rebuild credit.
We made an online payment of $200, which was placed into a savings account as a security deposit for the card (a trainwreck of events during our interstate move left us with pretty terrible credit), some time after (I think it wasn’t more than two weeks) they accepted our application and sent us a card to activate. Upon activating the card, we were charged with about $75 in fees, if I remember rightly… not outlandishly high for the circumstances, but still okay.
We paid those off, and kept the card under our limit for quite a while, until one day when close to the end of the period where we usually paid the card off to start the month clear, I used the wrong card at the gas station. Upon realizing my error, immediately after arriving home, I made an online payment to cover the over-balance amount.
Online payments take some time to hit, that’s fine – but we were then assessed with a $35 over-balance fee… over something around $1 over our credit limit. What’s worse, is that over-balance fee is assessed to your credit account – I’d only made a payment of about $10 to cover the gas I’d charged erroneously. Because of the time it happened, that $35 fee put us back over the credit limit and stayed that way over the billing period date, so we were assessed another $35 fee the next month.
By the time I figured out what was going on and made enough payments to cover these fees, we’d been burned three months in a row. We faxed a nice letter to AppliedBank asking if they could see it in their hearts to at least reverse two of these charges, since I’d cop to the first one but in all fairness I’d done my damnedest to avoid any over-balance time… after a while they wound up crediting us $25 for our troubles.
We’d thought about cancelling the card then, but decided to keep it. We’d since acquired another, non-secured card, but the AppliedBank card was our oldest revolving account so I figured it was probably better to keep it open even though it was costing us about $50 a year (annual fee, discounting the OLFs).
At some point around this time, we wound up grabbing our yearly free credit reports from the three reporting agencies, and it turned out AppliedBank were only reporting to two (they advertise they report to all three)… again I can let this go, it’s not like that was going to make-or-break us getting a mortgage or anything.
Fast forward to yesterday, when after misplacing the card somewhere in our house we’d managed to not charge anything to the card for long enough to pay it off completely. I was updating our Quicken, and to my surprise there was a $30 balance on it, and the statements were not available online.
I’d just assumed the card was around the house somewhere, so we were slow to report it lost. Seeing that $30 charge I had this horrible feeling maybe I’d lost it someplace else, and someone had finally used it… that $30 worth of herbal male enhancement was on it’s way to someone in Indiana on us… oh no!
I called to find out what the charge was, and apparently for reporting our card lost there was a $30 fee as well. At that point I figured it just wasn’t worth the hassle and we opted to cancel the card in return for having that fee reversed.
Now don’t get me wrong – secured credit cards are obviously aimed at people who’ve screwed up in the past, and them being rather unforgiving on any screw-ups is probably par for the course. I thought the “oops your OLF put you over-limit again for another month, here’s another OLF, oops that put you over again so we’ll be charging you again next month” game was a little shifty, but it was actually well explained in the terms we’d agreed to. Suffice to say if you over-charge a card with this bank, make an immediate payment of whatever you overcharged by, plus $35, plus enough to cover your interest and you should be only burned once.
Overall, the company did what they said they would for the most part. We didn’t have any of the other negative experiences other people had posted, their telephone support were helpful, and all of the major cock-ups were our fault. I like to think I stay on top of things, meticulously tracking every cent in our Quicken, and I still managed to burn myself a few times… make no mistake, this card is for people who’ve screwed up before, learned their lesson, and are not going to do it again. If you’re the type who will be late on a payment, or will forget your credit limit, you will absolutely hate life with this card.
The credit reporting probably could have been fixed if I’d bothered to call about it – it’s no big deal really, the agency they didn’t report to was actually our most favorable report anyway.
The interest rates and such were really quite reasonable – the minimum payments were quite high (at least $35, unless your balance is below that amount) which is actually a good thing because it encourages more responsible borrowing.
Overall Verdict: If you have terrible credit, at least $200 in cash you can live without for a few weeks and to use as a deposit, and you never screw up with keeping track of how much you’ve charged… this is probably a great card. Our’s was $50/year annual fee, about 10% interest rate, and with the exception of when we screwed up everything else was quite reasonable.
