Interest Rates

I decided to take a peek at my Capital One card to see what the interest rate is on it.

Now I wish I hadn't. I grimaced when I saw it and a cold wave washed over me as my blood ran cold and dots danced before my eyes as the world grew dark. Ok, slight exaggeration there but I did grimace.

Down at the bottom of the statement, in big bold letters, all-caps mind you:

ANNUAL PERCENTAGE RATE applied this period: 18.65%

To borrow a phrase from Martin Lawrence, "DAAAAAYYYYYYYUUUUUMMMMMMM!"

I have got to call them to see if I can get that thing lowered. I think I'll do it now.

I just dialed. They want me to enter my credit card number. Hard to do 'cuz I cut the card up a year or two ago :c)

Now it's switched over to a option menu. "0" to speak to a rep. WTF?? The wait time is 10 minutes?!?!

::sigh:: Holding

Wow... that 10 minutes must have been a time warp - it took less than 2 minutes. I'm already speaking to Todd. He sounds nice. Let's hope he can help me. I'm anticipating that they will tell me that due to payments being late x-months ago, they can't help me. Todd says it might be possible and he's connecting me over to an account specialist that will be able to help me.

Darn. I was hoping to deal with Todd. I'll probably get some pre-menstrual woman or some man that hasn't got any in the past few years and they are both grouchy and Customer Service is the middle name of their third-cousin's fourth wife's sister-in-law's best friend from 2 years ago.

Ok - just spoke to Rachel a Senior Account Manager. She looked over my payment history and said that there haven't been any late payments in the past 12 months. Wheeee!! Go me!

She's going to lower my rate to 14.9%. Yay!! She said the new rate will kick in tomorrow. She rattled off some information that she says will be sent to me vial snail-mail (good cuz I didn't understand a word of it except for "Cash Withdrawals are 19-point-something percent").

I'm wondering how long it will take me to pay off the $812 balance. According to the Cap-One calculator, if I can pay $141/mo, I can have it paid off in 6 months. If I can pay $107/mo, I can have it paid off in 8 months. If I can pay $87/mo, I can have it paid off in 10 months. If I can pay $73/mo, I can have it paid off in 12 months.

Hmmm... I'll have to do some monkeying around with the finances and see what I can do.