I guess it pays to be anal retentive...

...or maybe just detail oriented.

I am neither.

I can manage details when I have to, but it's not my natural tendency.

I met with my accountant a couple weeks ago and he gave me a hard time about not organizing my records with enough detail. So I had a bit of a homework assignment this past weekend: going over all of my business expenses, item by item, to see how things shake out.

It's a good thing I did.

I discovered that my primary business credit card had tripled my APR about four months ago. You read that right- tripled it.

Years ago- I had bad credit. It was a direct result of moving from city to city in my twenties, sometimes with less than $100 in my bank account. During those risk-taking times, I actually would live off my credit cards. I spent my early thirties cleaning up the mess. And I determined that the best way for me to stay on time with payments was to set up as many automatic payments as I could.

And that's what I did for this (ahem) nameless credit card.

So fast forward to this past weekend- I immediately get on the phone with customer service to get to the bottom of this. What do I discover? Apparently, about four months ago, my "automatic payment" happened to be less than the minimum amount due. That same amount is usually sufficiently more than the minimum, but I had a couple large business purchases that month.

If I had read the fine print of the information that came with my credit card, I would have discovered that if this ever happened, I would immediately and forever be increased to a "default" APR. Which was triple my usual rate.

So not only was I not adequately aware of this policy, I also didn't notice the change on the last four statements I received. (I typically, just glance down the transactions to see if there's any funky charges...the last section has the rates.)

Here's the kicker: Just by calling customer service and asking what had happened, the customer service agent reversed the rate back to my original. I didn't ask (I was about to)...He just did it. Which makes it seem even more scam-like. It's like they know it's a slimy thing to do, and all you need to do is catch them and they will stop. Ugh! So this $500-plus mistake is enough to motivate me to try a little harder to keep on top of the details.

**Sigh!** Will the growth opportunities never end? :)