Thursday, November 13, 2008

Um...this better be a misprint!

We bought a "pre-owned" home a year ago and part of the fun is fixing it up the way we want it. So in the spirit of home improvement we applied for a Home Depot card because of the special financing offers (12 months no interest, etc). This morning I got an email reminding me that our payment was due, so I jumped on to make a quick payment. Last month one of our financing offers ended and I wanted to ensure that the it was paid off so we didn't get charged all the accured interest. I opened the statement up (which I hardly ever do) and checked to make sure that everything was right. Then my eyes came across a box with the summary of the accounts APR (annual percentage rate)... this is what I saw:



If you can't see it, this is what it says:

ANNUAL PERCENTAGE RATE on this account: 251.59%

Yeah, just in case you aren't familiar with credit card interest rates 21% is considered really high. I'm assuming this is because we have differed interest due to the promotions, but it was still enough to freak me out for a second.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

This does look like a misprint. Hello, my name is Mario de Armas and I work for Home Depot in their Financial Services area. If you call me directly at 770-384-4086 I will help sort this out.

Thank you very much for calling this to our attention because this appears to be a computer error and we would not know how many customers would have been impacted by this unless one of you brought this to our attention. Thanks again.

You can do it. We can help.

Natali said...

Whoa! That's crazy! lol Maybe that is the combined interest (what it would have been for all of the months together).

Anonymous said...

^ Was that reply an actual Home Depot person? Craziness!

Brandon said...

@ diana: I'm not sure I did a little searching and found that Mario de Armas does indeed work for Home Depot as the Head of the Financial Services department, but I don't know if the gentleman who made the post is in fact that person. With all the phishing and scams going around, I'll wait to give card services a call unless I really get charged that crazy interest rate.