Being A Decent Human Doesn't Always Pay Off..

As most of my readers know, we have two beautiful little girls and another baby on the way. With that being said, we are trying to also look into buying our own house. Keyword: Trying. It seems as though every step you take you get knocked down a whole flight of stairs.

We decided the best place to start would be with credit scores. I have an excellent credit score and have done a very good job at monitoring it over the years, but Justin has never done anything with his credit (in fact he didn't even have any when we looked into it at first.) Weighing over options we decided to apply for a credit card that we could use for emergencies and small things and then pay it off quickly. Fast forward: we ended up with a Chase Freedom Unlimited card. 

We applied for the card, and received word that we would have our card in the mail in five business days. Fast forward ten business days and nothing. We called and they said they would priority mail us our cards. Finally, a month after initially being told we would have them, we got them in the mail. That should've been our first clue. 

Our card has a $1,000 limit on it, and with our rewards we earn 1.5% cash back on all purchases, with 0% interest for 15 months. 

Seeing as how we can earn cash back, Justin and I decided to pay all of our bills on our credit card, and then transfer the funds from his checking account to the credit card to pay it off immediately afterwards so our bills are paid, our balance is still next to nothing, and we aren't being charged interest. 

All in all for the month of June, we made just over $1,500 in purchases on our Chase card. We also made payments of $200-$250 at a time to pay it off, equaling out to $700. Then, July 14, we made a payment of $340. We went to Walmart to get some groceries a few days later and got about $50 worth of things and when we went to check out, our credit card was declined. Frantically I checked our account, which said that we had a balance of $600, meaning we should've been able to spend $400 more on it, right? WRONG. Our available credit was only $20.77. 

Furious I call the company who tells me that our account was "flagged due to suspicious payment activity" and our payment was frozen for authorization. How can you freeze a payment when it was taken out of our account over a week ago? And why, WHY is my account marked suspicious because I'M ACTUALLY PAYING IT OFF??! 

We had to wait ten days for the payment to clear, meaning we had a completely useless card and were being penalized for being aware of our spending and actually making payments on the card and taking financial responsibility for ourselves. What kind of company would rather penalize people who are paying off their debt rather than those with maxed out cards or in collections. I had a few words with a representative yesterday about it, and told them that if I didn't have that money on my card by this morning, I was cancelling our accounts and switching to whomever their biggest rival company was. 

Sure enough, I woke up to three emails from Chase. 12:27am. 1:35am. 7:00am. Verifying the funds could be seen on my end as well as theirs. 

We haven't even had the card for two billing cycles and I'm already 100% confident that I will NEVER use Chase Credit company again. Forgive me for paying my bills on time, I'll try harder to slack off next time. 

End rant.