Do not use cash. True story:
Last weekend I needed to return an item. The store insisted on a cash refund, to include even almost a dollar in coins. I was at first befuddled because it has been years since I have messed with cash. Finally came around, dealt with the paper money, and checked the coins for silver (i.e., real money). No silver.
Now I have to go to a bank so I can deposit that cash and get rid of it.
This is straying off topic, but I’m curious. How practical is this? I use credit cards nearly all the time as well, but how do you handle cash only merchants? Many of those businesses accept cash only because customers will come regardless - e.g. they make the best tacos in town or offer the best produce at the farmers market. How about tipping service workers like housekeepers?
I also like to have cash for occasions when merchant equipment fails, either due to power outages or internet interruptions. That has saved my bacon on more than one occasion, and I suspect the corner pizza place wasn’t going to accept a piece of silver as opposed to cash 
.
So my guess is that you don’t travel and generally don’t deal with many mom and pop outfits?
Agreed
Right
I havent used cash in years, besides funding the tooth fairy. I carry a couple hundred dollars or so all the time - as you said, just in case - but cant remember the last time I actually used it for anything.
*Ok, occasionally the grocery store registers add a discount, which leaves something like a 7-cents balance due (due to sales tax miscalculations). I use loose change to pay that, but only because I have it on me and I dont want to have to reconcile a 7-cent credit card charge.
So it was all your fault! 
I only personally know of one cash only merchant in my county (about 1/2 million people) I’m sure theres others but I only deal with one I know.
I keep a $20 in my wallet for cash emergencies but haven’t touched it in months.
Update - BoA denied our fraud claim because the chip was used… duh, the physical card was stolen. We provided them the police report information but apparently that was not good enough.
Now have to work this through the appeals department and the state AG office. Needless to say, we will be dropping our BoA cards and won’t be using them going forward.
If I may suggest, as proper revenge, that you keep your BoA cards and use them every (pick your women’s rights, black rights, brown rights, yellow rights, transexiegnet rights, gay rights, bisexual/biluminous/biradiant rigjhts day to use the card. Just once per year should be sufficient to proclaim your woke-edness, and punish the not-woked-enough crowd.
Best? How about worst?
I paid multiple thousands of dollars to Penfed at the end of December. They never told the credit bureaus I had made that credit card payment. So my score is lower than it should be because the credit bureaus think I still owe all that money, which of course I do not.
Called Penfed spoke with a supervisor:
They refuse to fix this unless I authorize them to first do a hard pull.
crazy
I told 'em to fuggetaboutid. Will have to wait for February and hope they do not screw up a second time.
Penfed customer service? Not great. 
That makes no sense, why on earth would they need to do a hard pull‽
As a data point for us, how long before your statement date did you make the payment and did the statement show the correct balance?
Final update - BoA overturned their decision as a result of a cfpb complaint I filed. We got our money back. The other feedback mechanisms (internal appeal, AG office complaint, calling them) were all fruitless. It required complaining to a government regulator for them to do the right thing.
I did some digging on the cfpb website as they have an entire database of these complaints. I queried based on complaints in the last three years related to fraudulent charges, excluding merchant dispute issues. BoA has spiked recently, which isn’t a surprise. The serial violators in this category seemed to be Barclays, Chase, and BoA. Then again, all three of those issue a bunch of cards, Barclays perhaps less so than the other two. AMEX was a lot lower than I would have expected - they were about halfway down the list.
As a result, I am thinking of throwing AMEX a bit more business than I have been. Their clawbacks are infamous (see post 1 in this thread), but I can live with that if it means they stand behind their product while the others leave you hanging out to dry.
Congrats. It’s so very strange that they treated you this way. Seems to be a straight up violation of Regulation E:
Even more strange that it wasn’t the AG’s action that triggered the fix. Though the above is a federal reg, not sure where the state comes in.
I surely agree.
Your guess is as good as mine. Maybe they think I’m trying to pull a fast one!
I probably made the payment on a “just in time” basis. But for certain my statement reflected the payment and the correct balance thereafter.
Penfed is a large credit union. They messed up and then refused to make things right straightaway. Typical.
I have now, as of today, paid off my entire balance there. It will be interesting to see if that does the trick.
Did they? Most (all?) issuers report balances on a monthly cycle. If you just slipped your payment onto the statement, it may have still missed the reporting cycle. Who knows, but there was in fact a reason why your updated balance was not reported besides they merely forgot.
As for the pull, there’s a perception that making such disputes is an indication of credit manipulation, bouncing balances around so that they’re never fully reported on your report. They likely want a hard pull to confirm there’s noting hinky going on with your credit profile. Yes, I’ve had entire relationships terminated for pursuing such off-cycle updates - we call it accuracy, they see it as highly unusual and suspicious. It is what it is.
Yes, they did.
But that is not what happened. In order to avoid interest charges my payment was due, and it was paid, several days prior to the statement closing. There was lots of time for them to get it right and, as I mentioned earlier, my statement reflected the early payment. Theirs was a failure to report. Nothing more.
Please switch to decaf. They did simply mess up. Such things happen especially in large outfits.
Entirely possible. It’s 2022. Suspicions abound everywhere.
Well, another angle here is to dispute the information on the account to the credit bureaus. That would presumably get them a copy of your report without a hard pull.
I tend to agree with Glitch though - with these credit unions, almost everything is outsourced to third party vendors, so it seems odd that this just happened for no reason. Was there a holiday (e.g. MLK day) sometime between your payment date and statement cut date? Could that have been the reason why it wasn’t credited correctly?
I agree - it’s a pretty blatant violation of federal banking regulations. If I had to speculate, I’d say they made some internal policy decision to somehow make these physical card theft claims harder to make. Might also be the case that they have internal goals around how many of these they approve/reject and perhaps, being at the end of the year, someone needed to pad their stats a bit.
BoA has generally gotten a bad rap in the customer service category. I can’t say that I disagree. Maybe they are fine if you don’t have any problems, or if you have their equivalent of Chase’s Private Client service at your fingertips. But if what I experienced is their usual standard, I’m happy that I’m no longer a customer.
Parden me for reading and responding to what you wrote.
I didnt say they didnt mess up, I said that there’s a tangible reason why this happened and that they didnt merely forget to update your account. You shouldnt need decaf to understand this.
Sure. I’ll even magnanimously pardon your failure to use spell check. 
Seriously, my payment was just in time to avoid payment of interest. I will wager you don’t pay a lot of CC interest either. We are two peas in the same pod on that one I bet.
Yeah, that is precisely what they did. The tangible reason is that their IT personnel are incompetent.
The statement balance should be what gets reported to the agencies. It shouldn’t matter if it was made a week or a second before the processing cutoff, if it made it onto the monthly statement it should be reported accurately. Mistakes happen so maybe the wrong amount was reported, but there’s no excuse for not fixing it when asked.
But then this bit confused me:
Did you make the payment before the statement date to result in a lower balance being shown on your monthly statement, or did you make it before the payment due date on the statement to avoid paying interest?
Re-reading, I now understand that you were paying the December statement balance and that the January statement closed with the correct balance (i.e. the total of new purchases from that statement) but they reported the sum of the December and January balances as if you hadn’t made that payment. And because it was the December statement balance, the due date for that payment would’ve been about a week prior to the January statement date (i.e. “just in time” for the due date but in advance of the statement date). Correct?