I was dumb many moons ago and purchased my laptop and a desktop computer from Dell. My main monitor at the time also died, so I decided to purchase another one. Long story short, I spent around $4k on equipment, and like a dummy, signed up for Dell’s Preferred Account. It’s Dell’s line of credit, like a credit card, except you can’t put anything but Dell stuff on it. Insanely high interest rate, but since I had a good credit score, they offered 18 months no interest. I took it.

Fast forward to June 7^th of this year. I finally have the money to pay off my Dell bill in full, so I call the automated phone system. No operators available, so I use the phone system to pay my bill. There’s a $9.95 convienience fee to do this. Why, I have no idea. Just another way to stiff you of money. Whatever, I want it done, so I pay it off completely.

I get an invoice today, saying I still owe $592.19. Looking at it, I see my promotion (interest-free) ended on 06/01/07. A whole six days before I paid my account in full (and paid what the automated phone system was saying as the payoff amount.) So since the promotion ended, they charged me all the back-interest.

I wasn’t very happy. True, I was late, but not THAT late, and the fact that I going from near-minimum payments to finally paying off the bill should’ve been good enough for them, right? I called up Dell, got an Indian* with a clearly fake American-sounding name. He explained that he couldn’t do anything, it was late, etc… I told him I wasn’t sastisfied, and wanted him to check further. He put me on hold and came back about a minute later, saying his supervisor would allow him to take $30 off of the total bill. Whoopie.

Lessons learned:

1. Don’t fall for interest-free enticements unless you’re going to for-sure be able to fufill the requirements before the due date.
2. Don’t sign up for credit lines with insane interest rates to begin with.
3. Save up money to pay for computers. They depreciate so fast, it’s not worth placing them on a credit account/card.

* I am not racist. I just hate hate hate speaking to someone who can’t clearly speak the English language. That goes for any race, color, nationality. If you’re in the business of speaking with someone on the phone all day, you should have a good and clear voice.