Blue Cash Late Payment Relief

One of the rules of the Blue Cash card is that you won’t earn cash back on spending if you have a late payment.  Until now I had thought you lost your cashback for the whole year if your payment was late just once.  Seemed kind of drastic to me but I figured that’s how they motivated people to pay their credit card bill on time.  I discovered this week that if you miss a payment, all is not lost!

Blue Cash Payment Issue

The problem started because our online bill pay system lets us setup rules for each bill and I have a maximum pay amount rule for every bill we pay.  If the bill is over the cap it won’t be paid and I’ll be notified.

Our bill pay system has been great because most of our bills were paid automatically while we were moving; but amidst the mess I overlooked the note that our Blue Cash bill hadn’t been paid.  Our bill was huge because we charged a lot of the remodeling costs for our new house on our card.  We had the cash to pay for it, we just used the card to earn the cash back.

Anyhow, since our most recent bill far exceeded the cap it wasn’t paid.  When I called into change the address for the card I heard an automated account summary and realized that the payment had been due the day before.

Cash Back Rules

I was really bummed because we had just racked up a chunk of change in cash back earnings from the money we’d spent and I figured we had just lost it all.  I paid the bill right away and called in to see if they could make an exception on the policy since we’d been a good customer for so long.

It turns out that although we had missed our due date, the billing cycle didn’t actually close for two more days and since I made my payment before the end of the cycle, technically it wasn’t a late payment.  I’m not sure if it works this way for everyone or every month but our due date on our bill seems to be more of a “suggested” due date, the payment wasn’t considered late until four days after the date on our statement.

But more importantly the other thing I learned is that a late payment doesn’t lose your cashback for the whole year, only on the bill for which the payment is late.  Of course you still don’t want a late payment because there are late fees and missing out on cash back for a month stinks. 

My concern over forfeiting a year’s worth of rewards for one late payment has always been one of my least favorite things about the card.  Not enough for me to take it off of the best cash back cards list but it did irk me. Now that I know I had mis-interpreted the rule I can earn my cash back in peace!

Ben Edwards, the founder of Money Smart Life, saved up enough to buy a Nintendo back when he was 12 years old. When he used the money to buy shares of Wal-Mart stock instead, he knew he wasn't like the other kids... His addiction to personal finance has paid off for his family and now he's helping you to afford the life that you want. Check him out on the web at Google Plus, Twitter and Facebook.

All posts by Ben Edwards