Half a league, half a league,
Half a league onward,
All in the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred:
‘Forward, the Light Brigade!
Charge for the guns’ he said:
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
A poem by Lord Alfred Tennyson. Funny! This was the first thing that crossed my mind when I decided to write about this topic. Dramatic? Yes!
In the list of top 5 things humans can’t live without, I will definitely list the credit cards. A credit card can be a savior. Perhaps it’s one of the most useful pieces of plastic. But if you put aside all its materialistic boons, you can see that later on, it becomes a part of you. It has a very dark side (ooh!) – an undeniable fact because today or tomorrow we will eventually get seduced by the pocket-sized plastic!
Even with all your psychological reasoning (more like restraining your shopping neurosis), you try to resist the temptation to own a credit card, but you still end up getting one. The reasons are many. It can be age-old satanic urges, or it can be because you got tranced by the mesmerizing personality of credit card sellers or maybe got it as a freebie with a new salary account or else opted for it due to other benefits like EMI.
Well…I lost the battle. My reason being the benefits of an EMI option and the ease of online shopping, which is 0% processing fee, 0% interest, cash on delivery, blah blah blah…
A month ago, I opened an account with a premium-rated bank and applied for a credit card. I deposited 10,000 rupees as the minimum initial amount for opening the account and submitted all the documents from address proofs to salary documents to the bank. I was told to wait two weeks.
After two impatient weeks, I called up the bank to find out the status. As usual, they did not have a single clue about it! I should have known it because you don’t actually get a definite answer from one person.
Anyway, they provided me with another number of the sales department. Totally bugged but optimistic, I punched in the new number and repeated the same question.
Oh, it’s a miracle! The being at the other end happened to answer my question. However, the happiness did not last long. The application for the credit card got rejected.
Well, he did not drop the BOMB yet!
Would you believe if I said even the salesperson was in disbelief? I asked why it was rejected, and the reason the bank stated was ridiculous. Note that it was the main branch of the bank in the city. It seemed I was not creditworthy, which was not true.
According to the Oxford Dictionary (online), creditworthy means, “(of a person or company) considered suitable to receive credit, especially because of being reliable in paying the money back in the past.”
There could never be an issue of creditworthiness. That I was certain. Besides, the bank (Bangalore branch) had initially confirmed my eligibility for having a credit card along with the card limit.
To my further disappointment, the salesperson had no idea why they said so. He assured that he would ring me up as soon as he crosschecked the status. After a maddening week, I finally got the call. He was told that the application was rejected because I earned only Rs. 10,000.
That’s the explosion I was talking about!
The bank assumed that the initial amount in the account was the salary I was earning (even after giving all the salary details !). How bright was that?