Consumer complaint received 2025-01-02 00:00:00
Product: Credit card — General-purpose credit card or charge card
Issue: Fees or interest — Charged too much interest
Company: CITIBANK, N.A.
State: FL

Complaint narrative:
XX/XX/XXXX - approved for Citi AAdvantage card. 

XX/XX/XXXX - made a charge of {$1200.00} to card. 

XX/XX/XXXX - approved for Citi XXXX XXXX for {$1200.00} charge, consisting of 36 monthly payments of {$39.00}, including a monthly fee of {$6.00}, for a total cost of {$1400.00}. 

XX/XX/XXXX - took out XXXX cash advances on card of {$500.00} each, totaling {$1000.00}, plus a {$50.00} fee. 

XX/XX/XXXX - Made a payment of {$1100.00}, carefully calculated to avoid paying interest, by covering the {$1000.00} cash advance, {$50.00} fee, {$39.00} flex plan payment, and {$17.00} in interest for the 20 days I had the cash advance. 
XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXXXX/XX/XXXX - Email from Citi announced XXXX XX/XX/XXXX statement is available online. 

XX/XX/XXXX - I notice on statement under Citi Flex Plan details that there only remains a {$99.00} balance on my initial {$1200.00} plan amount, and only XXXX payments remaining on the 36 month plan I began XX/XX/XXXX. 

Citi applied the entire {$1100.00} payment to my XXXX XXXX flex plan balance. {$1200.00} - {$1100.00} payment = {$99.00} flex plan balance on my statement. 

This violates the Credit CARD XXXX of XXXX, which requires credit card issuers to apply payments above the minimum to the balance with the highest interest rate first. 

Moreover, the way they applied my payment doesn't conform to their own policy, quoted to me in XXXX : " The minimum payment is first applied to any interest charges, late fees, and past due amounts ( if applicable ). The remaining portion of your minimum due will be applied to the balance with the lowest interest rate. Any amount paid over the minimum due, will be applied to the balance with the highest interest rate. '' Citi did not apply any of my payment to the {$19.00} interest charged on my cash advance. 

I contacted Citi today and spent an hour and XXXX minutes on chat with XXXX different associates. At the end, I was advised I would need to call Citi. 

Specifically, the chat associate wrote, " I see that you have paid more than the minimum due in that case it should have applied to the cash advance since it has more interest rate. But I see the payment is applied to flex plan. In this case I can make a detailed note on your account, I request you to call the phone team so that they can check with the possibilities of allocating the payment to the one that charges highest interest. I apologize for asking you to call them. As they are dedicated one who works on this, it can only be done by them as we have only limited access in chats. You can call our general customer support team who can help you on this. '' Then I called Citi and was told : XXXX. The reason my payment was not applied to my cash advance was because I did not wait until the statement came out to make my payment. 
XXXX. There is nothing they can do about it now because my payment has already been applied. 

I told Citi I had never heard of suffering a penalty for making a credit card payment early. 

I also told her I never heard of an exception from the Credit Card XXXX where an issuer does not have to apply my payments to the highest interest balance if the payer makes a payment before the statement comes out. After all, there is no grace period on cash advances. Interest begins accruing on the date of the advance, and XXXX even compound daily, or monthly. 

In any case, there is no reason the interest and {$50.00} fee on my cash advance should be added to next month 's cash advance balance when I made a payment of {$1100.00} on XX/XX/XXXX.

Company public response: Company has responded to the consumer and the CFPB and chooses not to provide a public response
Company response to consumer: Closed with explanation