Does anyone on Fluther have the Capital One credit card, and if so, is it any good?

I think you will be very interested in this Q.

I’m curious, what to you makes a credit card good? Is it the customer service? The interest rate? Perks it offers like money back or frequent flyer miles?

We had it for a short while years ago. As soon as we figured out what sort of business practices they followed, we took steps to get rid of it as fast as possible. I never want anything to do with them again, ever, no matter what.

No, but good Q. I get solicitations from Cap. 1, Chase, just about every week too. I really know nothing about them. I’m not biting, I think multiple CC’s are evil. lol

I had one. For years I kept it paid off every month. Then one day my mother tested positive for fourth-stage cancer and my father had to leave work to care for her. They lost their home and their prescription bills were so high that they couldn’t afford to eat. They couldn’t make their mortgage payments and lost their home. I used up my savings keeping them in groceries, then began running up my card so my parents wouldn’t go hungry.

After losing their home and their car and their retirement funds and most of their possessions, my parents finally had little enough left that the State was willing to help them, but by that time my credit card debt had ballooned to almost unmanagable levels. I was only just able to pay off the monthly interest and make a small dent in the overall debt. My Capital One card had a small yearly fee, and because I was paying close to the minimum, this fee – added at the very end of the month so that there was no opportunity to pay it – caused me to miss making the minimum payment after years of faithfully paying on the card. Capital One instantly invoked the small print and jacked my interest rate up to the maximum allowable by law.

Suddenly hammered by massive interest payments, I couldn’t pay down the debt. I was forced to use my entire income to pay the interest, then live on the card because I had no money. As my debt swelled, I began missing payments and the harassment started. I was called every single day, sometimes several times a day, for six months, during which time I was called a cheat, a liar, a scoundrel, a fraud, and a criminal. One of their managers told me I should apply for another credit card so I could use it to pay off this one, and that if I didn’t do this, he would have me charged with fraud.

Eventually the debt – which had now ballooned to almost double with all of the interest, penalties, interest on the penalties, and interest on the interest on the penalties – got sent to a collection agency, which began a multi-year campaign of phone harassment, calling me several times a day for years. At one point they told me that I was going to be charged with fraud for having applied for another credit card while in default – something Capital One had ordered me to do under threat of the same charge.

Eventually, after ruining my credit rating, destroying any hope I might ever have of owning my own home, and causing me repeated bouts of severe depression as a result of their non-stop bombardment of harassment, I ended up on a disability pension which they could not touch. By that time, the two year window they have to take me to court expired, so they could not collect in any case, even if they were allowed to garnish my disability pension. That doesn’t matter to them. It’s now something like six years later, and I still get a non-stop barrage of harassment, name-calling, and legal threats, despite – or rather because of – the fact that they can’t legally collect any money.

So no, I don’t recommend Capital One.

@SmashTheState How awful. Did you ever try to settle on a lower balance with them? Set up a more reasonable payment plan? I guess maybe you were dealing with a collections agency and not directly with Capital One? Collections is disgusting. They should all be reported for their harrassing ways.

Why wouldn’t the state give your parents food stamps and medicaid? I feel so badly about the situation your family went through. I can understand why it was emotionally devestating.

Credit cards are a must. Especially credit card with no fees. (So that way if you don’t use it, no harm anyway).

The reason they are a must: There is virtually no socialized healthcare in the United States. So in a medical emergency, how is one supposed to pay?

With a credit card.

Then don’t pay it back. Credit Card Companies and Congress are the same thing. Since Congress created the mess we are in, we owe it to them to rip off their favorite lobbying companies, when we need to. When we have to.

@JLeslie We live in Kanada. We don’t have food stamps here, we have welfare, disability, and food banks. In order to qualify for a disability pension, you need to go through a very long procedure where you are rejected on first application (they automatically reject all applicants, to deter people from applying) and have to spend a long time jumping through bureaucratic hoops and compiling documentation (it took me two years, for example), during which time you go on welfare. Welfare in Ontario pays a maximum of $590 a month. Food banks are usually run out of churches, and you have to go down and line up to get 3 days worth of food, which you are allowed to do once per month. If you need more food than that, you have to go every day to a soup kitchen. My mother, in a wheelchair and dying of extremely painful cancer, could not go, and my father couldn’t leave her alone.

Eventually the State will take care of you, but only once all of your resources are gone and you can prove that you are utterly helpless and destitute. This meant my parents had to burn through all of their retirement investments and sell all their personal belongings first. And of course there’s an intermediate period where you have absolutely nothing while the State churns through its bureaucracy and paperwork. If I hadn’t supported them, my parents would have been homeless and starving. Which means my mother would simply have died.

As for “settling” with them, eventually when the debt was no longer legally collectable, they kindly offered to settle for half, which still would have been more than the original debt, as a result of all their interest and penalties. Anyway, after what they put me through, I’d slither naked through rusty razor blades before I’d give them one brazen penny.

@SmashTheState I forgot you were not here in the US. Although, it is similar here that you have to burn through almost everything you have saved, some states are better than others, and you have to apply usually several times. We do have disability medicaid, at least in NY we do, and that is more lenient, allowing disabled people to have a little more cash in their savings and still get approved.

I can understand why you don’t want to give them a penny after how they treated you. It’s a shame the collections system is not done in a more civilized way. In the end your debt costs all of us so to speak, but if they had handled it differently you would have been more inclined to pay when you could I would think.

In my opinion the credit card fees and interest rates were and still are criminal, unsecured credit is a risk of course for the bank lending the credit, so interest would be a little high, but they are loan sharks in my opinion. I don’t know if there are any cards that have reasonable interest rates?

I had one for about 9–10 years until this last month.

The reason I had Capitol One was because I had no credit rating really and they accepted my application for a secured card (paying a fee every month).

I finally got a different card (a Visa) through my bank recently ..I’m glad to be rid of the Capitol One card. I tried several times over the past 4 years to get them to lower my interest rate and take me off the secured version with no luck. I didn’t like dealing with them at all. All they kept doing for me was raise my credit limit to an insane amount (compared to what I made monthly on disability). I even asked them to lower the amount but they would not. I never had a huge balance but still. I would not recommend Capitol One to anyone unless they really needed to improve their credit rating. Even then, I would warn them about it.

I believe banks are evil, and credit cards are the tools these predators hawk to hook more slaves into financial servitude. That said, the one advantage of a Capitol One card is no foreign transaction fee, unlike most credit cards. That comes in handy when you’re traveling outside the country.

Other than that, no real advantage to signing up with them.

@AngryWhiteMale Credit cards are great friends of those who only spend what they can afford, what they can pay in full.

We use it for foreign travel. It’s the only card I know of that doesn’t (yet) hit you with a sizeable per-transaction fee for foreign currency purchases.

But we never carry a balance.

I had a Capitol One Platinum Master Card. I used it to purchase furniture and I was always paying double the monthly requirement. When I decided, on my own, to eliminate credit, I had enough savings to pay it off and I called them to negotiate the interest. This was only as a consumer who was current and in good favor with them.

I was able to get the interest knocked down by half and I paid the entire amount immediately. Then, I closed the account.

5 years later. I am getting calls from this blood/cum-sucking company called Portfolio Recovery who rapes Capitol One accounts looking for anything noted as *settled.

Now they are trying to tell me I owe $3000 in interest on the account I settled on my own. They figure that from the amount I didn’t pay that I negotiated to not pay. It doesn’t appear on my credit report, Capitol One would love to give me another card, but they are in bed with these bottom feeding recovery services.

So, no. Capitol One is not the credit I would recommend. Go to your own bank.

I do have cards from other banks. Capital One I am going to avoid like the plague, thanks to my fellow Jellies. Thanks, guys! Lurve for all! Lurve party!

@jleslie, I have never carried a balance in my life, and not about to start now. Credit cards are useful, if you’re financially savvy enough to use them without falling into any of the traps the banks set out, but even when you do try to do the right thing, as @Blueroses did, they find ways to screw you.

Again, banks are evil. Ok, back up… UNREGULATED banks are pure evil. Regulated banks are just plain evil.

@AngryWhiteMale Ok. Hahaha. I do have a big problem with the high interest rates and fees. Like I said above, for some reason loan sharking is legal for banks, that part I find disgusting. Banks that prey on people with bad credit, that probably is evil.

When it comes to Capital One, you can’t even rely on the principle of paying off the balance every month. If they decide your payment is late, it’s late, and you get charged a hefty fee, no matter when you sent it. They go by their posting date, and too bad for you.

Want to straighten it out by calling customer service? Fine if you have several hours to spend waiting on hold. And you don’t mind getting cut off and going back to the end of the line a time or two. And then talking to a rude person who says she can’t help you because their records show you were late.

Some months you might not even receive a statement, but if that dawns on you too late to make a punctual payment, don’t look for any mercy there.

When we got wise to their tricks, we transferred our whole balance to another service. We had to go through hoops to do it, but it was finally official. The new service showed a debit as of a certain date. And Capital One showed a credit as of that date. And yet both services charged us interest for the same full month even though the full balance could not have been in two places at once for an entire month (if at all).

Those were the bad old days when we were in dire straits and owed everybody. As soon as you get into trouble, everybody gangs up to make it harder. Once we got out from under without defaulting on a cent (years ago now), we swore never to owe anybody again.

We do keep two credit cards now for purchases you can’t make any other way, such as travel on short notice, but we pay them off in full every month and never carry a balance. If I were broke I would throw away my credit cards because under those conditions they would only make me broker.

@JLeslie, see? Evil. ;-)

@AngryWhiteMale Yeah, but credit cards have saved me, and earned me a lot of money over the years.

I just paid mine all off with tax return money. I only owed about 2,000 total but the chunk from the tax return took care of it. Feels good.

Thanks for this thread, guys. I was considering a Capital One card but had enormous trouble finding reviews online that didn’t seem suspect – should have just hopped on here first! I think I will not touch this with a ten foot pole.