How Making a Late Chase Credit Card Payment Affects Your Credit

It’s just one late payment; and it’s only a day or two late, so it’s not that big a deal, right? Wrong; wrong, wrong, wrong! When you make even one late payment on any credit account, whether it’s a Chase credit card payment or a mortgage payment, you are doing severe and very difficult to repair damage to your credit score. Late is late; credit companies don’t care if it’s 3 weeks late or if it’s 3 minutes late past the due date; if you’re payment is not to them by the end of the date it’s due, it’s late.

So what happens now? You can call them and try to work something out so that it doesn’t affect your credit, and sometimes you might even succeed. However, you’d be far better just to avoid anything in like this in the future. Late payments are a credit killer, and not one credit bureau cares what’s going on in your life that made your payment show up late. Now, how does it affect you when you make a late payment?

Fees

It’s expensive to make a late payment; make just one and it costs you $35. That’s the standard late fee for most Chase credit card accounts. That $35 fee will accrue interest, and it will look bad on your credit report. Sometimes the company will reverse this fee and help you out if you’ve always been a great customer, but it’s best to just avoid this situation as a whole.

Rising Rates

Just one late payment can cause Chase to raise your interest rate so high that debt begins to accumulate like crazy. It’s a big deal. You can potentially go from a 12% APR to a 25% APR just by making one late payment, and this is not a good thing. This rate increase, by the way, isn’t going down when you make your next payment on time. It’s yours for good.

Credit Score Notifications

Now, it will take 30 days before a card company notifies the credit bureau that you’ve made a late payment. This is not so bad, but it’s not so good either. Since your payment is unlikely to be 30 days past due, this might not affect you. However, you need to know what will happen. Once a payment is more than 30 days late, credit bureaus are notified. This means your credit score drops drastically; if you have excellent credit, the standard drop is 80 points. If you have good credit, it could drop as much as 110 points. And there you go; you no longer have good credit.

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