That is a direct quote from a TD representative when I asked if anything could be done about the interest rate on my Unsecured Line of Credit.
For the longest of times, this Unsecured Line of Credit was “Prime + 1.5%”, but about 2 years ago, it was raised to “Prime + 2.0%”, which while annoying, was something I could live with, however, about six months ago I got a terse piece of Snail Mail announcing, “Yeh, it will be Prime + 3.0%. I was quite irked by this (as a customer of TD), and decided the next time I was in the Bank (say to cash in an RESP) I would ask about this.
In the interim, my daughter got her Student Line of Credit from CIBC, which I co-signed, and she got that at Prime, so I figured I’d bring the documentation with me (to TD) to see if I could motivate my friendly TD rep to do something about my unsecured line of credit rate. This is where the title of this post came in to play.
First I was easily able to cash out my daughter’s RESP (as I had move all E-series Index Funds into the Money Market fund, won’t get fooled twice on that one), in a relatively quick few minutes. I then had to have my “investing profile” updated to allow me to do what I wanted in another account, again done quite quickly as the rep simply cloned the last time I did this update.
At this point I brought up my Unsecured Line of Credit and the high interest rate (in my opinion) and the fact that I have good enough credit to co-sign a loan for prime only, and the answer was short and to the point:
“No, that is an unsecured line of credit and I cannot lower that rate.”
I asked if there was any chance to discuss it, and was dismissed with, “Your Daughter has a professional line of credit loan, not the same thing, we can’t do anything for you”. I believe I also asked if anybody else could help, but was told No. Now I have said previously, The Answer is Always No, unless you ask, but evidently it can be No even if you do ask.
Conclusions
If I remember the happy young lady at the CIBC, when she gave us the details about my daughter’s student line of credit, told me that an unsecured line of credit rate for me would have an interest rate depending on my credit rating and how much debt I carry, but she’d gladly check it out for me if I wanted her to do that. I guess I’ll be going to visit CIBC in the near future.
As a financial services rep at one of the big six (not TD) I can understand the frustrations. The sad fact is that the banks do not give proper explanations for branch employees to explain these rationales to clients. Also remember, no body you find in a branch, including the branch manager has any power to really do anything, especially with pricing on unsecured lending. Remember also, employees are also clients of the bank and often deal with the same frustrations and pay many of the same fees… Oh sorry I only had to pay $50 plus hst for my trading account administration fee.