I am really disappointed in your banking system. I went through a terrible divorce from an ex with PTSD which left bad marks on my credit via student loans. I've worked very hard to fix them after finally becoming financially free from having been locked out of my accounts by the ex.
What really disappoints me is that my current husband and I have two cars. Each charging OVER 22% in interest, one even CHARGES us a fee to pay our bill from our own account. We've had one for 3 years and the other for a year. The dealership and USAA both told us that after a year we could refinance and lower the APR rate. USAA constantly sends us preapproval notices and then denies us.
A year and a half ago, we were recommended by financial advisers that my husband should file bankruptcy, we were not married at the time, for him to recover from childhood medical bills that he hadn't known his parents chalked up for him that wouldn't allow him payment plans.
You can look at all his paychecks. You can look at all his payment history. He has never once been late on a single payment on anything and makes almost $6000/month on top of owning the condo we live in without rent/payments. Yet USAA STILL refuses to refinance our cars for us in order to help recover from this. We spend over $1000 on two car both less that $20K. We have NO bills except a pre-paid credit card from USAA. It's infuriating how you give us all this advice.
I spent an hour on the phone with a representative who truly was amazing and wanted to help get us away from being charged to make our payments and high interest rates, only to be told a computer determined we couldn't be approved because of a bankruptcy from over two years ago. That's it? No way to appeal? No personalization? Where is the personal customer service in that? If a bank truly cared about our needs, they'd have looked at the full scope of who a person is and their financials and seen that a number and a bankruptcy from two years ago doesn't represent this customer. How can a customer be valued if you're going to allow loan shark banks from a dealership to financially abuse us by denying us the oppurtunity to lower our payments and interest rates? I've spent over a year switching over all our financial needs to USAA and this is the only bills we have. But yet you deny us because a computer program says no instead of using a personalize approach or allowing us to appeal and show documentation that disproves risk by means of our past income or payment history? Appalling.
It's a shame and a disgrace.
