It was one of the tools that allowed me to maintain healthy credit card usage habits. In my idle time when messing around on my phone I’d gotten into the habit of just transferring money from my checking account to my credit card, often in excess of my actual balance, so as to cover “pending” purchases.
Not only will my bank no longer let me do that, just to twist the knife a bit, they will let me make multiple payments totaling the pending total due so long as no individual payment exceeds my actual balance.
So it’s not that they can no longer handle negative balances on the card, it’s just that they’ve half-ass made the interface disallow it.
The bank knows people will make mistakes that they didn’t before. They stand to make more money off those people. It is not a neutral policy that they’ve arrived to in a mutually beneficial manner.
Their favorite customer is one who slips up sometimes. Bank still gets the debt paid as expected, but now with more fees.
They also want people to say “thems the rules, deal with it”. That lets it appear to be a neutral policy while making more money than before.
Sure, so these people could be edit from using a debit card instead.
And kill their credit score while they’re at it. Which they need for a multitude of other things.
The system is rigged.
Sounds like the only option they have left is to … track their finances?
See, you’re falling right into it. They were tracking things just fine before the rule changed. The rule was changed so the bank could make more money.
No, the standard is to pay the statement balance by the due date in order to not accrue interest.
Which they were doing?
No, they were trying to pay down the balance after each purchase, well before a statement was issued.
It might not take the form you’d like but isnt that still [paying] the statement balance by the due date in order to not accrue interest.