Chase Cuts Credit Limit By $17,000!

 We Got It Back And You Can To.

Recently, Chase cut my wife’s credit limit from $18,000 to $1350 or $23 greater than her existing balance of $1327. A drop of nearly $17,000 was a shocker and we knew what that was going to do to her credit usage to credit availability ratio.  We had “missed” a payment but we thought that had been cleared up.  Obviously it hadn’t.

We do our bill paying through Bank of America’s Online Banking program.  The “missed” payment was the result of the payment being sent by the bank to the wrong billing address.  However, after a number of calls to B of A’s customer service, the bank agreed it was their error, reimbursed us the late fee Chase charged, and issued a letter of goodwill that they sent to Chase directly.  Unfortunately, it appears that Chase wasn’t convinced by the bank’s explanation and reported the late payment to the credit bureaus.

Chase as you may know, recently purchased Washington Mutual who had previously acquired Providian.  My wife’s original account was a Providian card that she opened six years ago.  In six years she has never missed a payment.  Guess what.  The first line Chase customer service person didn’t know that.  All that was in her computer was the brief history from the time Washington Mutual purchased Providian to the time Chase acquired Wa Mu.  In other words they were ignoring roughly five years of her credit history.

My wife can be pretty persistent on the phone and she finally got a supervisor on the line.  After several minutes the supervisor miraculously came up with the entire history to include the letter from Bank of America.  The supervisor agreed that a payment had not been missed and that information would be relayed to the credit reporting agencies correcting the report. 

When asked about the credit reduction, the supervisor said there was nothing she could do and to call the Lending Department.

After being switched around from a number of agents, none of whom had ever heard of the “Lending Department”, my wife finally reached a person who had the authority to change credit limits.  When that person viewed the history, and reviewed the credit report, she agreed to increase the limit back to the original $18,000.  She also told my wife that she was lucky that the original customer service supervisor had taken the time to update the file to include the Providian history.

So there is the secret.  If Chase has reduced your line of credit, and you originally had a Providian card, odds are they are not taking into account your history with Providian.  If that history is a good one, then it is worth the time (and frustration) to call Chase and get them to pull that history and reconsider your credit line.