Barclaycard minimum payment reduction letters

Stinkybell

I've just been speaking to a reasonably unhelpful Indian lady about why I got a letter telling me that some of my payments are near the minimum (they're not, ever) and that they're reducing my minimum payments. Apparently they're sending this letter to all customers, but I don't believe them. Please can you post your experiences with this below...

vet8

I had a very similar thing, they have reduced my minimum drastically. This month my new transactions were £98 of which about £74 was interest and the minimum was only £93. That is asking for trouble!

It says they are calculating this by adding the interest charged to 0.25% of my bill or £5 if greater.

Stinkybell

vet8 wrote: »

I had a very similar thing, they have reduced my minimum drastically. This month my new transactions were £98 of which about £74 was interest and the minimum was only £93. That is asking for trouble!

It says they are calculating this by adding the interest charged to 0.25% of my bill or £5 if greater.

Do you usually pay the minimum? I'm trying to work out if everybody's getting these letters or if Barclaycard are just out to annoy me!

TFD_2

I guess the change of minimum repayment ensures a consistent reduction in the balance across their customers regardless of APR.

If this means a reduction, then just make some additional payments!

MRSTITTLEMOUSE

I think they must be sending this letter out to everyone.
Both myself and my husband have had them but neither of our cards have had balances on them for months and were clear when we recieved them.
If we do spend on them we always clear the balance when we receive the statement so the minimum payment thing has never applied to us anyway yet they still sent us both a letter.

LilacPixie

Hubby received one. he only uses it for business expenses that are then cleared in full when statement arrives. Card never has a balance of any more than 300 between statements and its always cleared. I presumed the letter to be a standard accross the board one.

binaryuniverse

I've still not had one. I could do with one tho! Help me pay off this horrible Halifax overdraft instead.

Stinkybell

binaryuniverse wrote: »

I've still not had one. I could do with one tho! Help me pay off this horrible Halifax overdraft instead.

How odd! Why are they wasting their time sending these letters to people who don't need them, when there are clearly many people who could do with the relief

izools

Lol sounds like Barclaycard are blatantly going against the new reccomendations which are being considered, i.e. more transparency about how much you would need to pay to clear the balance within an example timeframe and higher minimum repayments if the current ones are barely above the interest being charged...

... I guess Barclaycard like customers that leave a lot of uncleared debt on their cards; odd, most would consider this a high risk ...

moonrakerz

izools wrote: »

... I guess Barclaycard like customers that leave a lot of uncleared debt on their cards; odd, most would consider this a high risk ...

You really don't understand how the banks operate do you ? That is what ALL the banks want.

Until "the new reccomendations which are being considered" become mandatory the banks will raise two fingers to them !!

izools

moonrakerz wrote: »

You really don't understand how the banks operate do you ? That is what ALL the banks want.

Until "the new reccomendations which are being considered" become mandatory the banks will raise two fingers to them !!

Back along when I had a flawless repayment history, I always kept a balance on my cards.

Barclaycard for example, never missed a payment, always within my limit, and always paid over the minimum (although sometimes only just).

As soon as I cleared a big chunk, they reduced my limit by £1,250.

Same with MBNA. I had a small limit with them anyway of £1,000 but when I bought some gear that brought tha balance up to near the limit and took my time bringing it down (earning them plenty of interest along the way) they reduced my credit limit to £600 when the balance fell below that.

In my experience, and going from what I've been told by credit card companies as a customer, customers that have a high balance / make tiny payments, are considered to be in "Debt Stress" and constitute a high risk.

Obviously I could have been misled by MBNA and Barclaycard, and my experience could be unique, but that's what has happened to me anyway.

..... Actually no, same thing happened to my mother earlier in the year her RBS cards were limit cut to just over her balance despite always leaving a balance on the card, always staying within her limit, and alwyas paying over the minimum, sometimes by a lot, sometimes by a little. I thought this was commonplace?

(And this happened well before I had any missed payments / late payments / defaults / etc. The creditors were right though! I was under debt stress :P )