Online billpay - a cautionary note
I am rather perturbed right now.
I've just had the unpleasant experience of having a credit company collection person call my house to ask for the money I owe them.
Huh?
Considering that I've never, ever in my life missed a payment of anything - not just credit cards - I was stunned. Shellshocked. I mean, what the fuck? How could I miss a payment anyway? I have all my credit cards registered in my bank's online billpay system, and the bank gets the statements and pays them automagically. As long as I have enough money in the account to cover the payments I don't need to worry about it, and since having enough money for running expenses has never been an issue, THIS SIMPLY COULD NOT HAPPEN. Seriously, in the past four years I haven't had to ever LOOK at my credit card statements. It all goes on in the background, all I need to take care of is the making enough money portion (if you can even call it that; when you think about it, the "money" I make is basically some entry in my bank's database that then gets some other entry from a creditor against it and the database subtracts the latter from the former without my involvement. The whole concept of "money" in this process is a little loose)
Well, something DID happen, obviously.
So I log into my bank account and look it up - and lo and behold, for whatever reason the statements from my two credit cards from this one credit company - Citibank - never arrived last month. So my bank's system didn't have the information needed to issue a payment, so the payment wasn't issued, and it became past due. This particular snag has not ever happened in the four plus years I've been using this system, and I was quite unprepared for it.
I called Citi and had to go through the humilation of trying to explain my situation. I'll spare you the details. For a company that promotes electornic bill paying as heavily as they do, Citi really doesn't give a shit when the system of electronic bill paying breaks down somewhere. The only lucky thing for me is that because I get billed on different dates, only one of the cards got hit, and I quickly issued a manual payment on both. I will be closing the account that got hit presently, because I find it ludicrous to have an account in my name anywhere with any negative entries considering my payment history and credit score. Let's say it offends my sensibilities. Their loss really, as most financial institutions salivate over customers like me.
Anyway, I just dug deeper into the issue and tried to find out the source of the problem. I finally did. It WAS actually my fault. Two months ago, I was subject to an attempt at identity theft. Someone stole some credit card checks out of our mailbox and was trying to cash them. Now, it took a while to understand what exactly happened and in the process, just out of good habit, I changed my login information to the Citi website. Well, what I didn't think about was my online billpay settings, and when my bank tried to retrieve the bill, it no longer could do so. Hence the missed payment.
The reason this didn't get triggered last month was that I had made manual additional payments to all my credit cards as part of my 2005 tax year last month. Most of my cards got two payments - the auto one and the manual one - but the two Citi accounts only got one (the manual one). Of course, that was enough to not trigger the missed payment in December and there you go.
So my cautionary note - if you do use online billpay, always keep in mind that it relies on your various login settings with your creditors to function. When you change your login information (like your password) in one it needs to be matched in the other.
I've just had the unpleasant experience of having a credit company collection person call my house to ask for the money I owe them.
Huh?
Considering that I've never, ever in my life missed a payment of anything - not just credit cards - I was stunned. Shellshocked. I mean, what the fuck? How could I miss a payment anyway? I have all my credit cards registered in my bank's online billpay system, and the bank gets the statements and pays them automagically. As long as I have enough money in the account to cover the payments I don't need to worry about it, and since having enough money for running expenses has never been an issue, THIS SIMPLY COULD NOT HAPPEN. Seriously, in the past four years I haven't had to ever LOOK at my credit card statements. It all goes on in the background, all I need to take care of is the making enough money portion (if you can even call it that; when you think about it, the "money" I make is basically some entry in my bank's database that then gets some other entry from a creditor against it and the database subtracts the latter from the former without my involvement. The whole concept of "money" in this process is a little loose)
Well, something DID happen, obviously.
So I log into my bank account and look it up - and lo and behold, for whatever reason the statements from my two credit cards from this one credit company - Citibank - never arrived last month. So my bank's system didn't have the information needed to issue a payment, so the payment wasn't issued, and it became past due. This particular snag has not ever happened in the four plus years I've been using this system, and I was quite unprepared for it.
I called Citi and had to go through the humilation of trying to explain my situation. I'll spare you the details. For a company that promotes electornic bill paying as heavily as they do, Citi really doesn't give a shit when the system of electronic bill paying breaks down somewhere. The only lucky thing for me is that because I get billed on different dates, only one of the cards got hit, and I quickly issued a manual payment on both. I will be closing the account that got hit presently, because I find it ludicrous to have an account in my name anywhere with any negative entries considering my payment history and credit score. Let's say it offends my sensibilities. Their loss really, as most financial institutions salivate over customers like me.
Anyway, I just dug deeper into the issue and tried to find out the source of the problem. I finally did. It WAS actually my fault. Two months ago, I was subject to an attempt at identity theft. Someone stole some credit card checks out of our mailbox and was trying to cash them. Now, it took a while to understand what exactly happened and in the process, just out of good habit, I changed my login information to the Citi website. Well, what I didn't think about was my online billpay settings, and when my bank tried to retrieve the bill, it no longer could do so. Hence the missed payment.
The reason this didn't get triggered last month was that I had made manual additional payments to all my credit cards as part of my 2005 tax year last month. Most of my cards got two payments - the auto one and the manual one - but the two Citi accounts only got one (the manual one). Of course, that was enough to not trigger the missed payment in December and there you go.
So my cautionary note - if you do use online billpay, always keep in mind that it relies on your various login settings with your creditors to function. When you change your login information (like your password) in one it needs to be matched in the other.
posted by Blinkered at 11:04 AM
2 Comments:
The other thing about online bill pay is sometimes the checks just don't arrive and sometimes a person screws up and thinks they didn't.
I've had three problems related to online billpay.
1) Check was sent, check was cashed, company didn't note that they cashed it. After talking to the bank and having them fax a copy of the cashed check to the company, they credited my account.
2) Check was sent, never arrived. Got company to talk to bank, bank sent new check.
3) I only have a couple bills that are not automatically paid (rent (because they lump the utilities with it and I can't predict the amount), landline phone, and cable). Since everything else is automatic I have actually had more trouble remembering to pay these others ontime than I ever did when I paid all bills. I need to put something on the wall to remind me which bills I actually have to open. I take full responsibility for this failing, but I do think it is interesting that I never had this problem when I had to pay ALL my bills by hand.
Interesting. You're touching on the point I was trying to make to the Citi manager I was talking to: that with online billpay, it becomes a habit to not look at your statements anymore. They need to realize this - and they do, in their marketing, when they mention how easier it makes handling bills. That's entirely true, but the main reason it makes life easier is because you can automate things and not worry about them anymore. If I still had to open every single bill, then log in and pay it, then it would be just as simple to simply write a check and dump it in the mail.
I just found that some banks have added alerting services to their online accounts, and have set mine up to alert me if a bill isn't paid. At least this way I can catch these glitches faster while still enjoying the convenience of automation.
Btw, I pay my phone bill automatically too - both land and cell. I set a cap on the amount, and as long as an exception isn't triggered, the system handles the varying amounts nicely.
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