M&S Credit card payment 31 December 2020 at 3:22PM in Credit Cards 4 replies 133 views

Rachg86

My OH has an M&S credit card in which he balanced transferred an amount back in feb, we recently purchased some new sofas in October and he put them on his M&S and paid the balance off within days. Lately we’ve been confused as he’s been accruing interest and the balance transfer still has another 9months to go until that incurs interest. He has contacted M&S to query this and it took the guy on the phone some time to work it out, but what’s happened when we paid the sofas off M&S have allocated that payment to the balance with no interest on it.... therefore we are now paying interest on the sofa purchase. 

I thought there was some legislation that came into place where credit cards took your payment and placed it on the amount accruing the highest interest. Virgin do that on my credit card, this has completely put us off using M&S and the sooner we can get rid we will. I wanted to write a complaint to them I just wanted to have my facts straight.
Many thanks 

zx81

It's because you didn't wait for the transaction to statement, so it was applied to the existing balance. 

Your next regular payment will go to the interest bearing balance.

Save writing the complaint letter as the legislation has been applied correctly and make sure you use a separate card for purchases.

Rachg86

Thank you. 

Error made it will not happen again. 

jonesMUFCforever

Rachg86 said:

Thank you. 

Error made it will not happen again. 

Thank you for not throwing your dummy out of the pram and taking responsibility for your actions.

phillw

Personally I would complain, because being charged interest because you paid the debt off a little too early doesn't seem entirely fair.

Normally if something like this can go wrong then I phone up and explain what I want to do, so that if it goes wrong then it makes complaining easier.

But if you paid it using their online system and entered the payment with a debit card, then the complaint I'd make was that it showed as pending and their system should have warned to wait until it has cleared or it would accrue interest. It isn't your fault that the transaction hadn't cleared.

If you paid it by sending the money using a bank transfer then you could try complaining that either the system should have realized there was a pending transaction that would accrue interest or that their T&C weren't clear enough that you could understand.

I don't think you deserve compensation, but I'd certainly ask for a refund of the interest. If you remain calm and nice then you can often get interest refunded in the case of a simple mistake.