MBNA rate increase

Double_Trouble

What's an AE?
Mandy

Bismarck

Alter Ego...

calibrax

Seems to be a repost of this thread...

http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/showthread.html?t=693041

but under a different user name...

Weird.

debtdesperado

I posted this on the debt-free wannabee board, but just in case anyone on this board has any good suggestions:

have just under £10,000 worth of debt on a Virgin credit card. The rate was previously 20.9% and I have been servicing the minimum and trying to make overpayments.

Yesterday I got a letter saying that the interest rate was going up to 34.9%:eek: :mad:

I feel as if I'm NEVER going to be free of this debt, and doing the snowball calculations left me in tears. I had a sleepless night trying to work out what to do - does anyone have any good suggestions?:

1. I have about £2,000 remaining of the maximum limits on other credit cards, so I thought I would balance transfer this amount from the Virgin card. They won't be interest free, but the interest rates are around 20.9 so less than Virgin.

2. I recently tried getting the credit limits increased on my other cards - no joy there.

3. I thought I would try getting a low percentage loan/credit card for a couple of years to pay it off (on the snowball calculator, paying off £500 a month would take 30 months and cost me nearly £4,500 in interest) but this might be difficult if the criteria for lending have tightened...

Does anyone have any other suggestions for how I could get this rate down (zero of course would be great, but I'd be grateful to get it under 20%....)

And has anyone else had a similar letter recently??

PROLIANT

I feel sorry for you, with this ammount of debt you have no guarantee of being able to transfer it else where, first contact Virgin and plea to them to reduce the APR, if that fails look at another MBNA card with 0% on Balance transfers and see if you can move the debt. If this method fails try getting as many 0% cards as you can and spreading the debt around or go for a low rate loan.

Hope you get this sorted.

Good luck

Mr P

scrapman

Your story is almost a mirror image of my story with MBNA on a balance of £8,600. Just the three late payments this year not missed and they are wanting £220 per month now and wont budge. I am thinking about debt consilidation loan with a greatly reduced interest rate just to get rid of them!!

beranabus

you should definately contact virgin to talk about a possible reduction of the interest and if they cant or wont help I would look into life of balance cards check out www.stoozing.com find possible card options then use www.moneysupermarket.com to check out the criteria for your chosen possible cards good luck

Jacq123

I received a letter from Alliance & Leicester yesterday, the apr for my credit card is going from 14.9 to 34.9, how can they do this to us. I recently transfered a balance of £4000 from another card to this card cause it had a 0 percent on balance transfers till April 09 and the normal apr was lower than my other card, I never imagined it would rise so quickly,will this still apply to that balance transfer, will I still have that offer until April 09 even though it has been taken over by a Spanish company. I owe a total of £11000 on it now, i feel sick every time i think about it. I have tried loans and other cards but no luck. I will try to ring them but I feel there is no good outcome to this.

emma12345

Try phoning them and asking them to reduce it. I did this with my Alliance & Leicester MBNA card about 8 months ago when they upped it from 20% to 31%. I explained that I was a long term customer, had always made payments on time and had never missed a payment so felt it was unfair. They reduced it to 22%, only slightly better but a bit of breathing space anyway.

However last month they upped it back to 29% (for no reason) so if they do give you a reduction don't expect it to last. Overpay madly if you can even if by a small amount, it all helps.

debtdesperado

Thanks to all. Sadly, I think that because of the credit crunch, the old advice of moving from 0% to 0% deal/opening new cards is no longer really viable - is it me or have suddenly lenders tightened criteria and simultaneously upped the interest rates?

I think I have reached the end of the road with regards to shuffling cash about... today I received a letter from another card lender saying they are putting their rate up to 31%. Have done the snowball calculator, and leaving aside the obviously preferable position of getting a 0% deal, I'll be in a much better position to take a 24 month loan to clear my cards, with an option to overpay (am renovating at the moment so need to finish that as flat is unliveable) once I have some spare cash.