Today we’ll talk about why cards get declined and what to do if it happens to you.
First of all, anyone can have their credit card decline for any number of reasons. So there’s no need to be embarrassed or alarmed, instead, it’s important to educate yourself, so it doesn’t happen again. To start, let’s talk about the most common reasons credit cards get declined.
One possible explanation is that your current balance is close to your accounts credit limit and there is not enough room left for another purchase before you make a payment, or credit cards just sometimes declined because the transaction seems like it might be fraud. This can happen if you are traveling outside your normal area for example.
Third is a more common than you might think for credit cards to get decline, because the users don’t realize they’re expired. Even though we’ve typed in our credit card expiration date countless time, we can still forget an attempt to use our card passed its valid period. Your issuers should automatically send you a new card prior to your old one expiring, but if you have not received it, you should contact the issuers because the new card could have fallen into the wrong hand. Similar to that, if you haven’t activated a new card yet, it made it get declined. If you try to make purchases with it. So when you get a new credit card, it has a sticker and striking you to have to be the plastic by calling or visiting the issuer’s web site, make sure to do that.
And to round out the list, it’s possible that your credit card is being declined because it was cancelled by the issuer. This could happen for a variety of reasons, like theft, fraud, delinquency, missed payments, or just inactivity. Either the notification announcing that change has not arrived, or maybe you missed it, just thinking the latter was junk mail. So now that the most common reasons for a transaction to be declined, you need to know what to do next.
If your credit card gets declined at the point of sale, so in person, first thing you do is ask the merchant to run it again, that initial failure might have been an issue due to the merchants card reader, which does happen from time to time. If you’re shopping online, make sure that you re-verify all of your information before you resubmit your card for payment because more often than not, it’s just been a typo. But if the transaction continues to fail, you should use a different payment method, maybe a different credit card if you have one and contact your decline cards issuer to find out what’s going on. Once that you can decide on the best plan of action. For example, if the issuer was that you forgot to make a monthly payment, you could still save your card by making it up immediatly. To call your issuer always use the number printed on the back of your credit card.
Good luck.
