paying off a cc hold in advance

[micky]

Say you have a $1000 credit limit on your cc and the rental car company puts a 1000 dollar hold on your card to pay for future charges.

If they had billed you for real, you could pay off the 1000 and have

1000 credit again. But can you pay off a hold?

The 3 CC companies I dealt with had 3 different rules. One would not let me pay online if the bill, a real bill not a hold, had not shown up on the webpage yet. The second let me put in the payment when the charge was in the pending area, and as soon as it was no longer merely pending, it let my payment go through. And the third was different somehow but I still coudl not pay in advance. But what if the bill was just a hold, by a rental car company or anyone else who uses large dollar holds?

[Ed Pawlowski]

Only way is to make a payment hand have a credit balance. If that works it should sold the problem. Other way is to get a credit increase. That should be fairly simple.

Never ran into the problem as my lowest limit card is $10,000

[micky]

Somone online who only has 1600 pounds credit and wants to rent a car.

[danny burstein]

In ye olde daize I had (for the sake of discussion here), a $1,000 credit limit. (This is back when that was a lot of money).

I anticipated buying some large purchases totalling $1,500.

So I prepaid an extra $1,000 into my account, thinking this would let me charge up to $2,000.

Bzzzzzt. The company would still only approve $1,000.

NOTE: this was Way Bck. Current procedures may be different.

Check with your company first, etc., etc.

[micky]

Very interesting. You mailed them a check, or used their webpage?

I had an $8000 bill coming up that I wanted to charge for the sake of the points, but no card that went up to 8000. I called each of my 3 cc companies and asked if I could do what you tried and they all said no.

I tried anyhow, thinking a programming error might let me do it. One wouldn't let me pay any more than my balance, which was zero. Another did let me pay, but I guess called it pending, to match a charge from that day that was also in the "pending" category. A couple days later, I got two emails very close togehter, one about the charge they had charged me and one acknowledging the payment. As nice as that is, it wouldn't help the guy I was trying to help. The third was slightly different from the other two but I forget how.

Clare said:

This guy is in the UK, so that is encouraging. I suggested he ask his cc company if he could do that.

I wonder why US banks won't allow it. I can't see how it hurts anyone or anything. Indeed, it helps the cc company by allowing one to make more or bigger charges, on which they take a commission.

[rbowman]

And their name is... micky.

[Milburn Drysdale]

I just use my banks "bill pay" system to make advance payments to my credit card.  Never had an advance payment declined.

Most Visa/MasterCard banks make pre-pay difficult because they want you to be 1 nanosecond late so they can ding you with a $49 late fee.

[Clare Snyder]

Definitely NOT my experience.

[rbowman]

I don't know about pre-pay but automatic payment is easy to set up. My CostCo Citi card is still on the traditional paper billing. It comes at the end of the month and jogs my memory for anything else I might have to pay at that time.