For Want of a Nickel!

 

I have not had a good experience with my CitiBank/COSTCO card. After I realized it could be both my membership and credit card at COSTCO and you earned money, I signed up. However, for starters, I'm on my second or third card after discovering charges in my statement that I never made.  They canceled the card immediately, eventually repaid the charges and life went on, that is, until this month.

While AARP and I have issues over some of their advice (YES men, get a PSA test. Prostrate cancer IS happening to more younger men more than ever), one of their best pieces of advice was never auto-pay a credit card without looking closely at charges EACH and EVERY month! I did, hence new cards.

However, the payment for last month had a discrepeancy in the bill, what I owed on the bill and what I wrote on the check. The difference? Five cents. I know with other banks if you write a bit more they apply it to the next statement. Say your bill is $849,78. You write $850.00 because you hate figuring the pennies. Evidently CitiBank doesn't like that. 

Here I wrote $902.03 on the receipt
and $902.08 on the check. It is marked 8.17.2026.

SO, the check was written and mailed August 17, 2026, check number 2548. Four checks were written that day and in checking my bank records found they were cashed as soon as August 21st and latest August 26th. My Citibank check was due September 1st and on the 31st of August I got a reminder that a payment was due September 1st. Since it had been mailed two weeks before and other checks had already cashed I thought it was stuck in their mailroom.

On September 19, 2026 I received a letter from Citibank written September 9, 2026 stating the check differed from my statement and that a new check had to be written. They enclosed the check and the slip I filled out. My check was for .05 more that the statement. Until they got a "valid" payment my check would not be credited.

Letter written September 9, 2026 
and received September 19, 2026,
10 days later

By then I had written a new check for the total of two months that was cashed in 5 days. So they sat on a valid check for 23 days before informing me there was a problem and it took another 10 days for me to realize the problem.

Five cents. And in their favor. No one could call or email long before? As an 80 year old senior, I can't believe how our new technologies have removed us from human interaction. If it's not on your smart phone it doesn't exist. Yet the media we see on the obsessive use of our smart phones is overwhelmingly junk news and misinformation. Is it real or not? Do we even know how to tell the truth?

I'm not sure how to go forward with this. They did suspend my card even while sitting on my check. If they could cash a check in five days, they couldn't have reached out five days before? I would have said to put it on my new balance. I've done that before. Now I question what would they do if I was on a trip to say, China, and paid forward so I wouldn't be charged a late fee. Would they have frozen my card and possibly stranded me there?

What remains interesting is the letter is dated September 9th but the envelope it came in was not postmarked until September 15th on their own machine with an actual delivery time of four days: pretty good for how awful mail delivery is these days.

The envelope postmarked September 15th, six
days after the letter was written

I have an excellent credit score and I don't need aggravations like this to worry about. Seeing the check was written August 17th it probably arrived to them no later than August 22nd (I'm being generous here). That means they sat on it at least 9 days, note August 31st date handwritten on the check, and then the next day started their emails of no payment.

As you can see they sat on the September 9th letter six days before mailing it. Meanwhile I had written a new check covering both months on September 12th and they cashed it September 17th, two days before I received their letter.

I'm not sure how to handle this. Yes the card includes my COSTCO membership, I do get money back from purchases but today so do most cards. Is it worth the aggravation especially when traveling? What if to avoid late fees I had overpaid my bill and then suddenly been cut off from using my card? It is better to find this out now than get stranded overseas later? The most galling part is that the amount is trivial AND in their favor! What would you do?

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