Hi Folks,
I wanted to follow up on the dialog about paying off our second mortgage that we recently put on a zero percent credit card.
Since the card has 0% interest for a year, our initial approach was to to put our money regularly into our ING money market account, and just pay off the minimum balance monthly with auto pay. We’d then pay it all off before the year was up and make a bit more on interest. Folks had mixed comments, but generally tending towards the side of not being worth the risk.
At it turns out, when I tried to put the card on auto pay it was not possible to do through the internet. Citibank’s process takes 4-6 weeks to set up through snail mail. Note that even their question and answer section of their website says that this is possible to do online. My thought is that they don’t have that option available for those on a 0% credit card, hoping that they will mess up.
Upon learning about the snail mail option (even more difficult from Afghanistan!) Citibank got an earful about being in the dark ages and having no consideration for the time of their customers or the resources used in the mail process for such an archaic system.
The end result is that I’m annoyed with the whole process and just want to screw them as they try to screw us. While part of me wants to keep their money as long as possible to take this money away from them, we’ll choose to screw them by paying off as soon as possible and canceling the card on the way out.
Best,
Miel
