SUMMARY: Household Bank credit cards are the worst in the world. YOU ARE AN IDIOT IF YOU ACCEPT ONE. Statements are sent out late. Your payments, if not lost, always seem to be applied after the due date. Your written complaints are ignored. Customer service is rude and incompetent. In addition to usurious finance charges, they will attempt to charge you every conceivable type of fee. This outfit needs to be put out of business. Do the world a favor and email this review to everybody you know and ask them to do the same. Do I hear CLASS ACTION LAWSUIT?

THE DETAILS: My wife and I have substantial income and have used credit cards prudently for many years. We usually pay off all outstanding balances due each month on our bills, but we will occasionally pay for a large single purchase on a credit card over a few months.

We both received unsolicited HB credit cards in late 1996 (under the label US West) and used them a few times over the next few months. Right away, we noticed that HB took an unusually long period of time to get their statements out (we date stamp all our bills the day they arrive). In the case of my wife's card, five of the first six statements took from 17 to 23 days after the statement date to be delivered. (The other one took 11 days to arrive.) I know it's common to blame the US Post Office but that's not what we suspected, since our other bills almost always were being delivered within seven days of their date of preparation.

Since we were carrying a balance on her card and because of this pattern of late delivery of their statements, we decided to prepay her account by sending an extra payment in, to be applied to the next month. (Credit card companies will tell you that you cannot prepay a credit card but that is untrue. There is no law that prevents a consumer from doing so on a variable installment debt such as a credit card. Sleazeball credit card companies such as Household Bank don't like it because it undermines their ability to collect late fees, which is their primary corporate mission.)

When her next statement arrived, we found that they had not posted either the current payment or the extra payment, even though we had mailed them the same day the statement arrived. Because of this, they levied a "late" charge, which we protested in writing (as you must do to protect your rights under law). Just to make sure they didn't misunderstand us, we also sent in two more advance payments, so now she's paid three months in advance. They never replied to our letter, which is a violation of federal law. (Credit card companies must reply to written complaints within, I believe within 60 days.)

When her next statement (for May 1997) arrived (19 days after it was dated) only one of the four payments we had sent in had been applied. Sent another letter. No reply.

One of the three payments made it into the next statement, but two were still missing, so we assumed that those two might actually have been lost in the mail. So we sent another letter and simply asked them to confirm that they couldn't find the two missing payments. If that was the case, we'd replace them. (We were wary of just replacing the checks because we had had an experience on a another credit card where a large "missing" payment suddenly got applied to the account 14 months later. When the paid check was returned by our bank we noted that it was badly crumpled, which led us to conclude that the check had somehow gotten caught in the bank's system, then suddenly popped back into the stream of payments being processed.)

We never received a reply to this letter, nor to a number of follow-up letters making the same request. Finally in Dec. 1997, we sent a letter saying that we were done asking for help and were not going to replace the checks. We treated the payments as made and if they ever wanted to respond, they knew how to reach us.

This pattern of late statements, payments taking a long time to get applied, and non-service continued through 1999, with a few other mistakes by Household Bank thrown in, including never receiving credit for an incorrect charge on my wife's account, two of her statements for different months arriving on the same day in the same envelope (how do you do that?), and a $65 payment being credited as $110 (which windfall we accepted and applied to the incorrect fees they were adding to the account). Finally in 2000, we both got tired of dealing with these people (while not quite as bad as my wife's experience, I was having similar problems with my card) and paid off both of our cards and cancelled them. We refused to pay the illegal and incorrect extra fees they had added to our cards. AND YOU SHOULD NOT PAY SUCH FEES EITHER IF THEY HAVE BEEN INCORRECTLY ADDED TO YOUR ACCOUNT. DO NOT LET ANY CREDIT CARD COMPANY GET AWAY WITH THIS, WHICH IS NOTHING MORE THAN THEFT.

After a lot of nasty letters, we think they have finally cleaned up my card but as far as we know, they refuse to correct the errors on my wife's, so we will likely have to initiate legal action to force them to reverse the incorrect balance they claim she owes.

What is interesting is that my wife had a similar experience with two Wells Fargo credit cards she paid off and closed. After arguing with their customer service people to no avail, she sent a complaint letter to the president of Wells Fargo. And just like that, one of his assistants looked into the matter and quickly concluded that their credit card operations were wrong. They promptly cleared up the remaining balances and wrote a very nice letter of apology. We've tried doing the same with Household Bank but its president, a man named Bobbi Mehta in Salinas, California, won't even reply. This doesn't surprise us given what a pathetic operation Household Bank is.

An amazing final Household Bank experience: Notwithstanding the mountain of letters we have sent to Household Bank about her account alone (57 by last count, of which perhaps six have been replied to), they have twice recently offered her a new PREAPPROVED credit card. The left arm of HB Bank truly does not know what the right arm is doing.



Recommended: No