Bank of America Increases Credit Card Rate and Reduces Credit Lines. What to do?
by Mr Credit CardHello, Bank of America increased the interest on my small business acct from 12.9 to 24.9%. I have never paid them late , I always pay more than the amount due, and my credit score is 730. My original credit line was 40,000 which was reduced to 30,000. They increased my interest rates effective 6/09. I called them and cancelled the card and said I wanted to opt out. They said OK. I later found out you can’t opt out of a small business acct with Bank Of America. I am lost on this one, trying to pay it down asap. This is such a bad situation my balance when i closed the acct was around 20,000, its now 16,500. What can I do? To top it off i’m a stockholder of BAC. Roland
roland johnson
Answer – Roland, since BOA does not allow you to opt of of the rate increase, then my only suggestion to reduce your interest payments is to transfer your balance to a 0% teaser card. The unfortunate thing is that very few business credit cards offer 0% balance transfer deals these days. So you might have to resort to transferring to a consumer card instead. That is the best solution I can think of. Let us know which card you get in the end with your credit score. This would be great information for our readers.
Note – One of the reasons why this email is important is that we just found out you cannot opt of of a rate increase with a business credit card from BOA. If anyone has any experience otherwise, we would like to hear about it.
October 30th, 2009 at 20:50
That is good advice because unfortunately with the tightening of business credit many small business owners are being forced to use consumer credit cards as quasi business credit cards. Absent being able to get a cash back business credit card I am personally a fan of using this strategy because at least with a consumer cash back credit card there is a way for the business owner to get some savings via cash back as opposed to just using a debit card.