My Credit Cards are Wreaking Havoc on my Life for no good reason - Are any of you having these problems

I have multiple credit cards that I have used over the past ten or twenty years and have treated them responsibly. I chose them all because I could pay them on line and adjust the due dates to be convenient. When I bought a car last year I was told my credit score was quite high.

In mid December I made a large payment against my Citibank business credit card to free up the line. As I've grown my business I've contracted various services which bill the card monthly and I knew I was going to need at least half of the monies paid to meet my obligations. I am expecting a large influx of cash from the sale of a house soon, and at that time I was going to pay the line off, but wanted to wait until then.

The first hint of a problem was getting a notice from one of my creditors telling me my card was declined. When I went online to figure out why, I saw that 2 days after recieving a payment that was at least 6 times my minimum payment, they lowered my credit line to just above the balance owed on the card. When I called them to find out why, they told me they did a check on me, found an irregularity with another account and had the right to reduce my credit as they had done. It had to do with a dispute as to what I actually owed that completely different line, which currently has about a $150 total balance due. By the time the billing period was up, the interest payment pushed my account over the limit. So I was going to transfer some debt to other little used lines, but then that wasn't possible. When I went to check and make sure that these distractions hadn't kept me from scheduling the payments on all the lines I have balances on, I was locked out of one of my Citicards and was scheduling the payment on my BofA the day after the payment was due.

Fast forward to today when I went to schedule payments on all my cards again, and was still locked out of the citicard so now it is late, and when I tried to call the number on the internet I was told to call back during business hours. The Bank of America card that got a payment 4 times the minimum the day after it was due and a call from me to explain what had happened had lowered my credit line to 1/5th of what it had been, and only a few hundred dollars above my balance owed.

I know a bit about how credit works, and you don't get credit score points for overpaying your minimums the way you get dinged for being almost maxed out on your use of your available credit line. So you can be making very healthy payments on your credit lines, and the sheer act of them lowering that line at will can trash your credit score. I'll bet you that if your score goes down they have the right to up your interest rate too, so then all they have to do is lower your line to the balance due and then they can jump your interest rate too.

I pay my cards online because back in the 90's some credit card companies were playing games with mailed payments, forwarding them from one payment center to another until they were late. This feels like that. You pay 25% of the principal balance owed and they lower the line of credit to within a few hundred dollars of the new principal balance, don't give the cardholder notice and when new charges hit the card, as they've been planned based on the orignal line, now the card goes over limit. And should that not happen, well your score goes down because now you're using 95% of your available credit. Again all of this with no notice.

This feels like financial assault to me. I am sick of these financial institutions stacking the deck in their favor and pulling the rug out from under all of us so they can justify charging 30% interest. At this point I'm not comfortable making any plans that involve paying for anything with a credit card. There has got to be a more secure way to do business. I want to stop using these and thus stop paying them interest rates fit for a loan shark. Do any of you have any ideas about where one can turn?