I know many people have had good experiences with CareCredit. And I completely understand that it helps fill a much needed financial gap for vet (and other medical) care.
That said, I just wanted to make sure people are aware of some of their practices before signing up. I signed up for CareCredit online the day before a vet appointment that I expected to be expensive. I paid for said appointment, and decided on a 12 month payment period. That part went fine.
My first statement came, and I noticed that their minimum payment does not add up to the full balance over a 12 month period. So, if you decide to go with autopay, do the math and make sure that your payments add up to the correct total!
I should have looked more closely at that first statement, because it took me a few more statements to notice a weird fee on it. A card security fee of some sort. I called Synchrony Bank / CareCredit, and they directed me to call the number next to that fee on the statement. Ok, so I guess they outsource their security thing to another company, weird but whatever. I call this other company, and apparently I had opted in to this fee during the sign up process??? I don't remember it, and I doubt I would've signed up for something like this. It must have been somewhere in the fine print and opted in by default. Not illegal, but definitely shady. The person I talked to wouldn't refund any of the fees I'd paid up until then, but cancelled it going forward. A quick google search shows that many people have had the same issue, though some were able to get all fees refunded.
Then, I had to put another vet bill on my CareCredit account before the first was paid off. Well, if you have multiple different purchases on your account, you can't split your payments between them yourself. You have to call every time you make a payment. If you have autopay set up, you have to call the day of the payment. Wow. I have had other loans under the same institution, and I was always easily able to split my payments however I wanted through my online account. Synchrony is way behind the times. This makes is so much harder to manage your payments and make sure different purchases are paid off in time.
And speaking of paying things off in time, the APR is pretty ridiculous if you don't do so.
After dealing with all this, I've decided to pay off my account within the next few months and close it afterward.
A google search reveals that a lot of people have had bad experiences with Synchrony Bank and their suite of 0% APR credit cards. Just be careful and actively manage your account if you do decide to go for CareCredit.
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from Pets https://www.reddit.com/r/Pets/comments/q1p7s2/warning_about_carecredit/
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