Credit-card rate hikes catch many unawares

WASHINGTON — Check your holiday credit-card bills closely.

Some credit-card companies are raising interest rates on good customers even if they pay down their balances, on time, every month. The reason they cite is that the customer's credit rating has fallen elsewhere.

That was a rude surprise to Janet Hard, a stay-at-home mother of two teenage boys from Freeland, Mich.

Depending on her husband's salary as a steamfitter while she raised the children was financially difficult, Hard said, especially with college tuition on the horizon. To keep the family's finances in balance, Hard said, she paid more than the minimum payment on her Discover card every month, plus an $8.00 Internet fee.

Or so she thought.

In February, Hard noticed that despite her payments, the balance was "barely moving."

A phone call to Discover solved the mystery, but not the problem: The company had increased her interest rate from 18 percent to 24.24 percent after running a spontaneous credit report that showed her other credit-card balances and available credit on inactive accounts put the family at a higher risk of defaulting on their payments.

Most stunning, $3,478.39 out of $5,618 in payments had gone to Discover for interest accrued over the previous two years, Hard told the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations Tuesday. On a monthly level, about $176 out of her $200 payments went to finance charges. In the past year alone, Hard had paid $2,400 but reduced her debt by only about $350.

"My husband and I feel as though we have been robbed," Hard told the panel. "As we struggle to overcome this financially, we also are struggling to overcome it on an emotional level. Some days, this feels more difficult than the paying off of our balance."

The panel's chairman, Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., is sponsoring legislation that would restrict credit-card interest rate changes to certain instances — such as at the conclusion of a low, introductory rate period, contracts that have variable rates and when a cardholder violates the agreement with the issuer.

"When a credit-card issuer promises to provide a cardholder with a specific interest rate if they meet their credit-card obligations, and the cardholder holds up their end of the bargain, the credit-card issuer should have to do the same," Levin said.