Power company recently outsourced their payment system and now have to pay a fuckin' fee to pay my goddamned bill. The only way to avoid that is autopay.
Further infuriating is I have to re-add my bank info to yet another third party system.
Fuck the modern world, man.
So in my city, the water bill would charge a fee for paying online, the only way to avoid the fee was to write a check and they had no auto pay options at all.
I would just overpay and write a check for 6-months of service. I knew it was time to write a new check when my balance stopped being negative.
I guess what I'm saying is it would have been incredibly convenient and not at all infuriating to have a fee-less auto pay option.
It's stuff like this that makes me amazed at how advanced Brazil is in some regards (or how backwards USA is). We can, from the comfort of a banking app (that can make instant money transfers to any other bank, free of charge), set up automatic payment of utilities like phone, electricity and water, no extra bank bullshit hidden charges applied.
Oh, we can do that too, at least to varying degrees. Depends on the bank and what services they offer.
My bank will at least do what's called "Bill Pay". It's (mostly) the equivalent of me telling the bank to write and mail a check to a company on my behalf. I don't currently have that setup, but it is something I'm looking into. It's been available for a long time, but years and years ago when I looked into it, only certain companies/utilities were supported by my bank.
Are there banks that don't do this or charge? I just assumed these things were the absolute basics of banking and are free for everyone.
So did I, but then there's OP's post, which made me think this isn't universal
My power company found a new and infuriating way to fuck with me. They send every e-bill with a required payment of $0 and then the regular balance but my bank auto-pay only reads it as $0 due today and ignores it.
So the bank says it's the power company's fault, the power company claims to have no control over it. Oh and they don't send paper bills any more (although they send me a paper report every month shaming me for stressing the grid by charging my electric car) So you have to remember to go online and look up the bill and pay it on their awful $5 transaction bill pay instead.
Sounds like late fee extraction. I wonder if calling the state AG about this would do anything.
Use Bill Pay from your bank/credit union to mail them a check (without even paying postage yourself)
That's step one. Step two is to get enough solar and whole-house battery storage so you can cut the grid and give them $0.
Would be nice, but where I live less than a fifth of days in the year are sunny on average.
I can't updoot this enough. Fuck everyone's fee ridden bullshit apps, websites, outsourced garbage services. I make almost everyone send me a paper bill or i just won't pay.
I made the numbers up as I don’t recall them offhand but my energy company effectively has this policy now. :/
I do exactly this. My bank will try to use ACH or a one time debit card automatically, but inevitably ends up sending a check each month. What's better is if I use the bill the water company sends and mail it back with a check there is a fee, but they don't charge it when my bank sends a check.
They're not trying to fuck over the banks. They have better lawyers.
That's the way to go! I pay all my bills through the bank. All they need is your services account number and a mailing address. It's much nicer when you can pay all your bills in one place instead of having to deal a bunch of different payment apps/websites.
Exactly. I control when and how the money goes out. This way I don't have to hope that a) the payee doesn't make mistakes and take out more than once or more than the scheduled amount and b) that the payee isn't caught in a data breach with my banking details.
At the end of the day, I just take a little time to make sure all the bills are scheduled for the right amounts over the coming few weeks.
Yeah, I've been meaning to look into that. Especially so I can start unlinking my bank details from sites that will eventually expose them in a breach.
This is more than mildly infuriating.
The principle, yeah. The fact that it's 50 cents keeps it mild though
Canyou mail a check?
Some banks will do autopay. The bank obtains the bill and mails a check.
Isn't First Energy that company that got busted for bribes but then the local politicians/courts basically let them bribe their way out of trouble with $20 million???
Not sure if same but their scandal in Ohio put some GOP bigwigs in prison recently.
Pay by mailing in paper checks to maximize their costs.
That maximizes my costs as well (plus hassle). I don't even own a checkbook.
Your bank mails the checks for you for free, I haven't owned a checkbook in a decade.
Harry needs checks to pay his “action bills”
If they’re going to cost me money being stupid, I’ll do it back to them.
Doing good work out there 👍
Further infuriating is I have to re-add my bank info to yet another third party system.
"We don't NeEd STrONG coNSUmer PRoTEctiOn LAws bECauSe YOU Get to DECiDe WHO YOu Do bUsINesS wIth"
Edit: just to be clear, I'm not mocking OP.
Yep, this is what peak fReEdoM looks like.
My landlord gave me the option of paying online. For an additional $10.00 fee.
edit =added the cost.
"I'll pay online without the additional fee."
"We're not renewing your lease." Or better yet, "Please sign your new lease, at the additional $1200 market rate per month, or kindly vacate by the 1st."
Hope you can get time off work and have the friends and money to relocate so you can enjoy another 12 months of Freedom™ from living on the street!
Housing costs are such a racket.
If we’re talking about rackets, I got a bone to pick with the insurance industry too
Oh God, if anything they're even worse. Same page, friend.
Another sovereign citizen
If you have a good credit union, you should be able to set up an extra account and you only use that account to pay these extortion bills. Electronically transfer funds in from your main account, and never give anyone access to your primary.
My power company made me download an app to pay for a bill with cc . Now that I should be paying bills with a credit card but I was in a tight spot and needed to keep the lights on .
Gotta do what you gotta do 🤷♂️
Annoying AF in principle but at least it's only 50 cents. My fucking rent payments charge a % fee, so I mail them a check every week and make them do the legwork
In my country we have free 'autopay' on the banks end. You simply setup the details of the recurring transaction in your mobile app or on the website and it will automatically start paying.
Seems like you should say "fuck modern capitalism" instead.
The problem here is that your bill is based on usage so there's no way to know exactly what your bill will be each month in order to set up an automatic bill pay.
My variable (usage-based) utility bills are sent as "e-bills" to my bank, so the bank's bill pay system can pay them anyway. I can even set it up to pay in full up to some limit, so it doesn't blindly pay if the bill is outrageous due to some mistake.
Yes, with no warning or anything. I called yesterday but the wait to talk to someone was over an hour so I chose the call back option. Then I missed their call. I’m gonna make them reimburse the $2.75
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