well, I think that's too bad that you applied for a card which wasn't the best, and I know it can be frustrating.

I think someone has told me about a Capital One card with no fee similar to mine -- I'm not sure, cards have so many different terms and somehow you are stuck with the one when you signed up, but I think there are some legacy terms on mine which might have been better than some others (I know there were on the miles option, but I don't have that anymore). I don't know -- I might check into it, although the one pct cashback and no foreign X fee at all more than pays for the $19 a year charge, and it's not much, so I've just been lazy about looking into it.

As for why they can't do anything in four days -- I do some consulting to health insurers and know how some of these companies that have huge amounts of transactions on their computers work, and it doesn't really surprise me that much that they can't change the application for four days. Once stuff is into the system, processing may be done in batches at certain times and that is a large company, so things may not be done by hand interactively on a computer or something. I don't know, just speculating that there may be computer reasons for that.

I don't know about the 45 day wait period, but I imagine they devised that for financial reasons that make sense in terms of financial risk for their cards. I'm just speculating, but they probably do have a reason, although I know it is frustrating to you.

ok, I just looked at their website and I see why I still have the $19 fee (but not $39). They don't have a fee-free cashback Mastercard, only Visa. I want a Mastercard as I have a AAA Visa which I really like the terms on (and it has no card foreign X fee, either, but does have the one pct Visa foreign charge) and is free and gives me various forms of cashback.

I like having both a Visa and Mastercard for traveling, but only want two major credit cards, so this is it for me as I think they are both pretty good, so I'm satisfied. Having alternatives came in handy once when I was in London and the entire Visa network went down for at least 12 hours or so, and no one could charge anything to them.

Someone explained this to me once, it's basically marketing -- Visa gives some places better terms than Mastercard, so a lot of banks, etc try to push Visas on you rather than Mastercards.

I think you should call them anyway to see if they can waive the $19 fee. Of course, we're all lazy, but I've realized that's how companies get you. Unless you "hound" them, they will never give you the best terms. It's really annoying, I find. I used to be cavalier about these things, but I'm getting increasingly irritated.

By the way, re the 4-day wait period, just to clarify -- there's no way to change the application once it's been submitted. As I understand it, it'll take 45 days before I can reapply. The fact I called back the same day meant nothing.

But it did take the application less than 24 hours to show up.

Maybe I'll call them again to see if there's really a 45-day wait.

But anyway, maybe it'd have been too late for this trip. I leave on Sept. 29. I should investigate other stop-gap options.

Oh in their defense, I forgot to say that they claimed the 45-day wait is a Federal regulation.

Anyone shopping for a credit card might want to (should) visit this site:

http://cardratings.com/

It won't answer all your questions it will give you a leg up.

I believe Citibank also has some sort of waiting period between applications, so I don't think that part is unique to Capital One.

yeah, I did call them once about that and they wouldn't waive it because they don't have a fee free Mastercard, only Visa. I thought they might since I'm a good customer and have been for some years, but they didn't. So I just sucked it up for the last year or so since I called on that. I could try again, never hurts.

well, you can't be mad at Cap One if it's a Federal regulation, though. BTW if you were attracted by my no forX fee AAA Visa, I have been told that new applicants have a 3 pct foreign X fee, although legacy ones do not (like me). They were taken over by MBNA last year or so and new applicants have a fee, although I don't.

True, though it was unclear to me whether the fact that you can't change the application after it's filed is a federal regulation. This could just be because the system is antiquated.

But I'm certainly mad about the misrepresentation and how difficult it was to extract information out of them.