Does Providian charge you $9.95 to pay your bill online? How are they about applying payments? Can you pay the same day your bill is due?
In my experience most cc companies will not charge you to pay online if you do not need a same day payment. They do charge you for same day payments and over the phone payments. This is called 'screwing the customer'. What I love is when they say to pay a couple of business days ahead of time but the money leaves your account the next day. What a ripoff.
Capital One and Direct Merchants Bank do allow you to pay online the day your bill is due, Capital One even on Saturdays! So Cap1 is the best I have experienced. Household Bank is the worst, as they want the payment 2 days before the due date. I don't know what the situation is with Providian.
Citibank certainly is up with the evil ones...6 day waiting period on the online payment method (just to verify the bank account), and they ding you $14.95 to pay by phone. Looks like I may have to eat the phone payment fee as the payment I sent on the 5th STILL (as of 2/12) hasn't shown up yet (due date is the 17th, meaning it's gotta be there by Friday or I'm screwed). Anyone know if Citibank has a habit of sitting on payments (namely, payments made via web bank transactions)???
Providian reserves the right in the cardholder's agreement to charge $9.95 for paying online, though no one on this board has reported actually being charged for that. This policy has been in effect with Providian for about 18 months. Citibank will waive the pay-by-phone fee if the online service is down, but you have to call technical support to get them to waive it.
If you do web bank transactions as in paying your bill from your local online banking service. The payment would be applied the date you told your bank to make payment. If you gave them a date of 17th, then your payment would be applied that day regardless of when the money left your account. I have paid all bills online for 5 years now and never had a single problem. Well, I did have some problems but they were all my fault for making mistakes.
I have always paid my Providian online and I've never been charged a fee for this. My payments have always posted within 24 hours. If you decide to do this, when you are finished the cite will tell you when the payment will apply to your account. Providian also emails me when the payment posts. But get this, I paid my bill TOO EARLY (paid in mid November because I was anxious) in December of 2001 and they tried to charge me a late fee. They removed the late fee after I threw a fit, but they still show me being late in their system.
I had my bank send payment out so it (should have) reached them by the 10th (was sent on the 5th according to their records). As of last night (2/12), payment still hadn't posted to the account. I'll wait and see if it shows up when Citibank updates tonight, but if not, I'm going to have some calls to make tomorrow.
