Swing Lo..Now That You Don't Owe.

I piddled the afternoon away and still have errands to run, and walks to walk, but I thought I'd share a delightful letter I got from "Citi" - by the way, when did they stop being Citibank, Citicorp or Citicard...is this like a Cher or that Pdiddy thing?

Oh well, as I've mentioned here before I'm in the process of slaying financial dragons or at least attempting to...in all honesty, I've inflicted a few flesh wounds at best so far.

One dragon whose cold black heart I successfully drove a stake through was "Citi." It wasn't easy. I transferred everything we owed them to our credit union (by the way for those of you who mentioned in the comments area that we should join a credit union I'm sorry I didn't respond....we've always been credit union members...Amy had that account at Compass Bank simply for their alleged convenience, but our vast fortune is now and has always been handled by a credit union. We actually belong to two; the second held our car notes...which by the way no longer exist! Yeah, that's a real dead dragon, but the tale is for another day.

Anyway, some time ago I paid off "Citi" - it seems like "Citi"should have a tilde or an apostrophe or something doesn't it? "Citi" standing alone seems rather cold and faceless. Actually now that I think about it I suppose there's some merit to that. I digress...I paid them off and told them where they could put their 28.7 percent interest rate. For those of you who haven't hung on my every word, pretty much everyone reading this, "Citi" refused to negotiate our interest rate with me at all even though I had a credit card with them for more than two decades. They wouldn't even discuss the concept. They're thugs as far as I'm concerned...not even decent Humphrey Bogart character-like thugs who in truth have a sliver of decency buried deep down somewhere in their necrotized souls. In my opinion, "Citi" is - are? Is "Citi" pluralized? I guess "is" is fine...the mob "is" and I might as well follow that grammatical precedent - "Citi" is a bunch of merciless money grubbing heartless, kick your grandmother type, gangsters.

Okay, add a nap to my to-do list, right after running errands and walking walks...I'm obviously getting cranky.

So today I get home from the hospital to be greeted by a letter from "Citi." You think that's French? It wouldn't surprise me if "Citi" were French. The letter, much to my surprise, accurately showed I owed them nothing...zip...or as they say in France, "Diddly squat."

That was nice and part of me gleefully hoped they'd send me such statements every month in perpetuity....maybe I could break the bank 37 cents at a time, by having them send me monthly statements for absolutely no reason.

That would surely qualify as the mildest form of "going postal."

Included in the bill for $0.00 was this addendum:

"Good News! Due to your recent payment performance, we are lowering your Annual Percentage Rate (APR) to our standard APR! You will see the new APR on your next statement."

They're lowering my interest rate...and here I was thinking "Citi" didn't have a heart.

They still need a tilde though.