Testimony of Marvin Weatherspoon

Subcommittee on Financial Institutions and Consumer Credit Hearing
Thursday, March 13, 2008

Good morning. My name is Marvin Weatherspoon and I’ve traveled all the way from the great state of Illinois to tell you my story. I share the concerns of many of the people in the room today and I know first-hand what happens when these big credit card companies are allowed to do whatever they like.

I’m a dad and a granddad. I work at McCormick Place, the convention center in Chicago. I’ve been there 28 years, working my way up so that now I’m the supervisor of the linen department, responsible for all the linens needed for the huge conventions and meetings in our facility. Even though I have a good job—I make $17.26 an hour and I am one of the lucky people in this country with health insurance—I’m always careful about spending money.

I’ve tried to be as responsible with paying my bills as I am at work, but it doesn’t seem to make any difference to my credit card company and I feel like I’m drowning in debt.

I opened a credit card with Bank of America—the biggest bank in the country—because I thought it would help me financially. I used a low interest rate offer to consolidate about $12,000 of home repair bills in 2000 and thought it was the first step toward getting out of debt.

Since then, Bank of America has raised my interest rate from 4.25% to 19.99% to nearly 25% today. Meanwhile, they’ve doubled my minimum payments from $130 a month in 2000 to $347 a month today. I’ve never charged anything else to this card but—after making payments every single month for nearly 8 years—I’ve only been able to pay off about $800 of that debt.

I’ve done the math and the bottom line is I’ve made a minimum of $15,360 in payments to Bank of America since I opened my account—since they increased my monthly payments over the years I’ve probably sent them closer to $25,000.

I ask myself how that can be, and then I see that all but $108 of my last monthly payment of $347 went to pay the interest. 

You’d think I’ve been a bad customer the way Bank of America is treating me, but I’m not. I pay my bill every month through automatic deduction from my checking account, and the bank admits that I’ve never once been even 30 days late. When I call Bank of America to ask for help, they tell me they can’t help me or send me to outside credit counseling agencies.

The last time I tried calling my credit card for assistance, a customer service representative tried a different approach. She told me the only way Bank of America would ever lower my interest rate was through their hardship program—but that she wouldn’t recommend it. She said in exchange for lowering my interest rate a little, Bank of America would report me to credit agencies and that black mark would ruin my credit rating for 5 years.

At this rate, I feel like I might as well file for bankruptcy—but I really don’t want to do that. I just want to pay off my bill under the interest rate and payments I signed up for. So I keep trying to get Bank of America to understand and in the meantime, every time they raise my interest rate and payments, I have to cut back on other expenses a little more.

I’m getting by, but not by much. I don’t drive unless I have to and I can’t help my grandkids the way I’d like. When Bank of America increases my bill I have to go without—I cut back on groceries if I have to. Right before Christmas, Bank of America raised my minimum payment by almost $100, from $257 a month to $342 a month. When I called, I got no real answers again—only that Bank of America changed their rules and there was nothing I could do about it. Since the payment is automatically deducted, I paid the increased amount, but I had to cut back on Christmas presents in December and on food in January.

I’m not asking for any special treatment, I just want to pay off my bill under the interest rate and payments I signed up for. It just doesn’t seem fair to me that you can pay your bill on time for eight years and be worse off than you were when you started.

What concerns me even more is how common my story seems to be. My friends and coworkers talk about similar problems with Bank of America and other big banks. In a country like ours, what’s happened to me shouldn’t happen to anyone, but it seems to be happening to almost everyone.

I’m sure you share my worries and can understand why I believe it’s so important that you and other lawmakers take action to change the worst practices of the biggest banks and credit card issuers in the country. If there were basic standards for fees and interest rates on credit cards, Bank of America wouldn’t have been able to keep raising my interest rates and payments without giving me a good answer for why. Banks wouldn’t be able to do whatever they want, regardless of how much it hurts working people like me.

Thank you.