BEWARE OF CREDIT CARDS
In general my husband is very prudent and cautious in financial matters keeping bills and receipts in order, paying all bills on time, etc. But he failed once and that too in a most inappropriate time.
The story goes here......
My hubby once gave me an ABN Amro add-on credit card(its free. thats y). I used only once in the past 2 years. I booked an online train ticket for Rs. 120 on nov 2008 and promptly i forgot it and didnt even tell my husband. But the irony was he didnt get the statement too. Finally after 8 months he received the statement with interest and penalty stating 3700 Rs. We were aghast. Then he fought over tele-banking with some dumb executive and reduced the payment to some 2800Rs. Cursing me for the loss, he made a cheque for that amount and put it in a drop box. we thought the matter was settled. (But it wasnt and we werent aware of it until the news hit us in the middle of a crucial time.)
Four months later we booked a house and applied for a home loan in SBI. Until that we didnt know there was a institution called CIBIL or every individual has a credit history/rating. The SBI guy told us we have a pending credit overdue and asked us to clear it before he begins loan processing. we said we didnt aware of any credit overdue from any credit card as we didnt receive any statements. He said he checked in cibil and there is definitely an overdue and he cudnt help us more. We zeroed in on this ABN bank credit card and asked the tele-banking guy about it. He siad we have an overdue and the cheque we dropped in the drop box was not deposited. The guy doesnt know why we didnt recieve any statements for these four months for the pending overdue. So, finally my husband went all the way from thiruvanmiyur to nungambakkam branch to pay the amount in cash. The bank couldnt even provide a no due certificate on the spot. It said we'll send by post. We hope to recieve it in few days unlike the statements which we never received. And after submitting it to the sbi we hope to get the bank loan in 10 days.
The lessons learnt are:
1. Its better not to use credit cards at all.
2. Its better to have more than one form of communication with banks. for eg. mail, sms and post to recieve statements and bill amount and confirmation of paying bills.
3. Misfortune never comes single.
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