kahunaburger

It is still not over! I can’t believe I have to write about this again.

Per suggestion of a friendly kahunaburger-reader, I called Chase over and over again to have them refund the late fees and finance charges. Somebody suggested that you will eventually end up with a customer service rep who is willing to refund those items. And, sure he was right: after about 5 calls I had somebody on the phone who reversed the charges, leaving me with a positive balance of $18.29 (money that Chase owed me).

At the same time the charges were reversed, I asked them to cut me a check, send it to me and delete my online account for good.

This morning I fired up mint.com and within a minute of updating my balances, I receive an email from them, telling me that a “Finance Charge” of $1.00 has appeared in my Chase account.

My initial reaction was “WTF?”! You can see the original late payment fee ($39) on April 27 after they did not get my payment on time. On April 30 you can see the transaction that paid off my balance entirely. A week later there’s the finance charge ($11.19) and finally on May 19th, both the late fee and the finance charge were reversed.

On April 27th my card was destroyed. The same day I also changed all automatic payments that used the same card number. No activity whatsoever since that day.

And still those guys have the audacity to charge a $1.00 finance charge on June 5th!!!

Three lessons learned from this experience:

1. Never, ever do business again with anything that has Chase associated with it.
2. Whenever you don’t like a fee that appears on your statements, call them a thousand times until the fee is waived.
3. Check and re-check every single line item on every statement – you’d be surprised how much money you save that way.

Next on my list: make them remove all records that they ever had of me and make sure that I’m not getting a single piece of snail-mail/e-mail from them – those two are going to be the hardest yet.