Again, I must repeat. Statement came on Monday, September 26, 2016. Paid ON LINE payment was taken out of checking sometime last night. It’s the 21st century. Pay your bill on line.

Our Amex card was $375.00 for membership. PER YEAR.

Ever use a Department Store card? That interest is HIGH. It’s the price of using someone’s else’s money. I really don’t understand all this complaining.

Tell me, what credit card co., allows you to make payments from a Debit card? Open a checking account – problem solved.

Merrick Bank is a rip off!! Agreed I paid my payment ON the due date which was on a Sunday. They charged me a late fee. When I called customer service they said the late fee would be taken off since I DID PAY on the due date. But it wasn’t !! I am very upset. I will somehow get this paid off asap. I am tired of their lying. One rep doesn’t know what the others are doing

You said “Tell me, what credit card co., allows you to make payments from a Debit card? Open a checking account – problem solved.”

My Capital One credit card does. I pay my Capital One bill EVERY month with my debit card. I have a feeling you work for Merrick Bank because all you do is defending them as if your life was on the line… pretty lame.

I just was approved for one of Merrick’s unsecured VISA cards. I have read the negative reports here, but they did not deter me from applying.

My FICO went into a deep dark hole five years ago due to being laid off, getting evicted, living in my car, then selling my car to pay the rent on a warehouse bay I lived in illegally, then finally hitting rock bottom and sleeping on bus stop benches before finally getting back on my feet. I now have three unsecured cards besides the Merrick I just got. All of them I got from pre-screened offers that came in the mail. The Merrick is the first one that did not have an initial 0% APR for six to 12 months, but even that is not a deal breaker because your goal at this time in your life should be to pay off your balances every month, not pretend that you can afford a higher standard of living than your monthly income can handle.

It amazes me that people with bad credit history fail to understand how the game is played. The complainers reveal by their complaints that they do not understand that what we are dealing with is the inevitably slow process of paying your dues, which takes years, that everyone who has bad credit has to go through.

Merrick wants $75/month fees? So what. That is the price we have to pay until our FICO is high enough, long ago, to be approved for a card with better terms so we can cancel Merrick. If you cannot afford $75 a month to rebuild your credit, you shouldn’t have a credit card anyway.

And for god’s sake, NEVER get cash advances.

Avoiding late payments is easy. Never mail in your payments. Duh! Pay your card off, every month, and pay it online. Then, log in every day and check if your payment has shown up yet. If it hasn’t after four business days, call the bank. I never have to call any of my banks because I pay my balances off twice every month, the day the statement comes out and again two weeks later. That way, you still are paying off your charges every month but you pay less interest because interest is charged daily on individual charges and charges never stay outstanding for more than half a month. Ergo, you effectively cut your APR in half.

These cards are not free money. You have to pay it all back, the sooner the better. My approach is to setup a few of my recurring bills to auto pay from my credit cards. I would otherwise be paying these bills anyway from my monthly income, but this way those payments are used to rebuild my credit history automatically. Just do not try this unless you know you have enough discipline to live within your means.

Also, exercise enough discipline to pay yourself, ergo, savings, every month. Your savings are there to make sure you have enough cushion to pay unexpected liabilities which might pop up during a particular month. You still want to pay it off by the following month and credit cards are a good cheap way to get low interest 30 day loans … way cheaper than payday loans which surely everybody knows by now that you should NEVER sign up for.

I have had this card since Feb 2016 and had my credit limit increased to $2500 from $1250. Have never had any issues with fees since I always pay it off on time every month. I have never paid any interest nor fees since I have it. I think it is a fairly good card to have with the exception that there is no rewards program. I will always be their customer as long as they want me to be. It has opened my doors to more rewarding cards such as Discover, Chase, Citi, BOA, Barclays, and combined credit limits of over $60 K in less than 2 years!!!

I have had a Merrick card for a month. A few observations:

1) It is right now 5:30 AM on the 1st of the month and their web site has not let me log in for hours. Be aware of this and plan accordingly, especially if your statement due date just happens to be, surprise, surprise, surprise the first of the month,

2) I have known welfare queens who feel compelled to rush out to a 24 hour Walmart at 12:01 AM on the 1st. I know a guy getting disability who rushes to an ATM before sunrise on the 1st, even got mugged doing this, but still continues to do this. Dumb, dumb, dumb.

3) It is like Merrick has the same people supporting their website as Obama had supporting his ObamaCare website. Caveat Emptor.

4) All banks are criminally insane. Merrick is not unique. They know the law well enough to go right up to the legal limit of what they can get away with.

5) Yes, they take unnecessarily longer than necessary to update their online data. Banks do this because they know the law allows them to, even though all banks are tied together through the Federal Reserve which means they never need more than a few seconds to know about anything you do with one of their cards. But, late fees are a significant source of income for banks and our bought and paid for politicians have made it legal for banks to trap you into late fees by delaying account status.

6) I go by the posted available credit limit, which typically is updated days ahead of the balance and before transactions are finally listed online.

7) To minimize the consequences of any bank’s loan shark tendencies, I manually maintain my own personal log of all transactions rather than depending on their online data which, again, tends to not be updated until days after transactions are actually made.

8) People who work for banks in customer support are worthless human excrement who have no problem screwing other human beings to keep their job. Caveat Emptor.

This comment will answer the obvious question of why some customers think Merrick customer service is great while others think it is horrid. Hopefully, it will also help those who are considering whether, or not, to apply for a Merrick card to better understand what they would be getting themselves into.

I should start by saying that I am a 64 year old retiree and, before I was laid off a decade ago, I was a lead technician of the technical support department of a global Network Engineering company. I have an extremely qualified grasp of what constitutes acceptable customer support. And I also have a good grasp of the games unscrupulous companies play via their customer disservice departments to deceive customers while pretending that their only goal is to serve their customers.

I have had one of Merrick’s credit cards for about a month. Today is the 1st of the month, which just happens to also be the due date of my first monthly statement. Prior to today, because I _KNOW_ banks are shameless scoundrels, I logged into Merrick’s website every day and verified that what they reported online as the status of my account did, indeed, match up with the records I keep manually of my transactions.

Until today, I was able to log into their web site everyday with no problems at all.

Today, for the first time, suspiciously on the due date of my statement, for the past 9 hours, I have not been able to login. I get the screen I get everyday when I log in, but after I enter my user name and password, I get back a message that it is waiting which never updates to anything else.

I have, so far, spoken to three people in their customer service department about this problem. Each of them told me that there is nothing they can do because they can get in fine from their computer. I asked the first one to connect me to her supervisor. Instead, she connected me to one of her peers. I asked her peer to connect me to her supervisor, which she did. Her supervisor then told me exactly what the previous two had told me:

1) They are having no problem at their end.
2) They have no IT customer support who they could transfer me to who could troubleshoot my problem further from an IT perspective.
3) They have not received any other complaints from any other customers reporting a problem like mine.

Okay. Here are my conclusions:

1) It is highly improbable that it is just mere coincidence that, after weeks of being able to log in every day with no problem, the first time I have a problem just happens to be the exact day of my due date.

2) I suspect they were not telling me the whole truth when they said no one else had called in to report any connectivity problems. For a bank on the first of the month, it would be unusual for their customer support department not to handle multiple calls about connectivity problems. Elderly customers, and poorly educated welfare recipients, get paid on the first of the month. They live from check to check and some of them do not have the best understanding of how to use the Internet to do something as simple as log into their bank account.

3) They probably were telling the truth about being able to get in fine from their end. I am a programmer myself. I know _exactly_ how a competent IT tech would enable firewall rules which allow access to in-house employees while denying access to a particular customer on his particular due date. Why would a bank authorize such firewall rules? Because late fees are a significant part of a bank’s profits.

4) Merrick’s ridiculous manner of doing business can easily be prevented from causing you late fees by simply doing as I did. Instead of making the minimum payment on your due date, divide that one payment into multiple payments made every week, adding up to significantly more than what you estimate your minimum payment will be … Ideally, adding up to your total charges for that month. Hence, yesterday when I could log in, the minimum amount due on the 1st was $0.

Remember Sun Tzu’s advice from his “Art Of War”:

ALL WARFARE IS BASED ON DECEPTION

None of these issues will not happen if you pay ur bill online,

Have great credit after 2 years rebuilding, 70,000+ avail. got invitation NO fees!! Called, and she said It was correct, NO atm withdrawl fees!! NO annual fees! 19.9% so NO other credit card doesn’t charge for cash withdrawl…. EVERY cc charges 10.00+ for cash advance… not merrick. it’s all based on your credit as far as your invitation details i.e. no fees whatsoever. So I use it like an atm card if I need cash and it’s working out great!! (meaning, if MY bank, wells fargo, isn’t around, I can use any atm and just pay that atm’s 2.00 fee… Merrick 0.00 vs wells fargo 3.00 + 2.00-3/machine) so, it’s been a life saver at times if I needed cash. That’s the ONLY thing I use it for, as 2% return on double cash and Discover 5% (10% first year… just cashed it out, was 205.00 got 410.00 deposited into bank) I don’t understand how some people don’t have ‘bad’ credit, just NO credit. and use debit card for everything…. you’re just throwing money away. literally. If you’ve got good credit now and get an invite, it’s most likely NO FEES, and if it isn’t then wait till it is. Also, since you’ll have good credit and have over 20 credit cards obviously this card would only be used for cash advances (ONLY IF NO FEES LIKE MY OFFER) as all other banks go overboard on that but to me it’s my ‘out of the area’ atm card haha… and yes, I pay what I get in full, never paid a dime to merrick and have gotten tons of green outa machine 😉

I make payments on three credit cards by mail every month. They are mailed 10-14 days before the due date. All of them are processed in a timely manner, except Merrick. For some reason, Merrick delays crediting of payments two or three times a year. Typically, the payment will show on the statement as being processed on the Saturday following the due date and credited the following Monday. They charge a hefty late fee on the next month’s statement, which of course has to be paid off at a high interest rate.

Of course, they can claim that the payment was delayed in the mail, and there is not much you can do after the fact to prove otherwise. Of the three banks, Merrick is the only one that seems to have this problem. Sometimes they are slow to update the status of purchases and payments on their website, so you don’t always know where you stand.

You can draw your own conclusions. This is not the kind of company I like to deal with. I would not recommend Merrick to anyone.

Making payments more than once a month is an excellent idea. Thank you for that suggestion.

NOT A FAN, I didnt apply nor receive their card and they are suing me for big money. They are crazy,if they think that is legal to pursue this action when I havent applied nor received their card.

NEVER ANY PROBLEMS WITH THIS CARD. This card was a great credit booster for me & now I get unsecured lines of credit from all the big banks. They’ve also increased my credit line by triple without me asking.
My suggestion for those of you who are actually trying to boost your credit or have problems with the mail, is to immediately sign up for the minimum payment auto debit from your computer or mobile phone. Make it for your due date. Most of you would only have to pay $35 a month at most, if you carry a balance, which is pretty doable for most people, even those living paycheck to paycheck. That way there’s NEVER an issue being late on any payment.
It’s pretty ridiculous in the year 2017 to actually “mail” a pymt anywhere. Says to me you’re still using the check float game? You can even make a pymt over the phone (you all know you have phones) The people that mail their pymt do this & expect their payments to arrive on time, can’t believe the payment is then “late” & blames the Credit Card company.
It’s YOUR PROBLEM if you can’t follow the “rules” when you have the privilege of using someone else’s $$!!

OMG! Do NOT think about applying for a Merrick Bank Credit card account!! Do NOT! I applied and decided I didn’t want the account. Received card in the mail and just shredded the whole envelope after reading all the horror stories. I never “activated” the card/account. They had the nerve to send me an email advising me I was past due on my payment AND reported it to the credit reporting agencies!!!! I NEVER activated the account!!! This is standard practice when you apply for a credit card. You have to activate the account in order to finalize and open the line of credit you were approved for. Apparently not with Merrick Bank! Customer Service had the nerve to tell me that I should have called and canceled the account. NO! You can’t charge an annual fee for an account that has not been formally activated upon receipt of the card! And you can’t prove I ever received the card in the first place! This is shady as F*ck! Why isn’t the federal government doing something about Merrick?! Seriously, DO NOT give them any of your information at all or you’re screwed! Unbelievable that they expect me to pay for an account that has not been activated.

You should have read the informational material provided when you accepted the offer. Better yet, if you had been more responsible with your credit history, you wouldn’t have had to deal with this type of credit card company in the first place. 🙂

you need to climb down off your high horse with these comments. you have Absolutely no idea why this person is dealing with this company. Life Happens (apparently to everyone but you). and if she/he did make bad decisions in the past, that still doesn’t give a company the right to exploit them. Companies used to have honor in America but now they don’t — I guess with voters like you they don’t feel they need to anymore.

Agreed! It seems when someone has a problem that could have been avoided, people automatically blame the lender. Why pay the day before the due date? I agree with Consuela, using any credit card wisely, you will flourish. Continue to make bad choices is why you didn’t have good credit to begin with.

Also, if you are REALLY trying to fix your credit – You do NOT take chances or just throw a CC in the trash and you know EXACTLY what is or what isn’t on your credit report EVERY month. Take responsibility for your actions, make better choices.