After the “Loser” incident last Friday, I should share with you one of my serendipitous “Nice Saves”.

My boss gave me another impromptu assignment last Wednesday. I was to make the room reservations for several of our instructors who are attending a conference next month.

As it turns out, all the rooms at the conference rate ($199) were sold out. The regular priced rooms were significantly more expensive ($279) . When we added up the regular price, we were looking at nearly $3500.

Our company isn't real big, and we keep the limits on our credit cards low because we usually pay whatever we can by check.

My boss' company credit card only goes up to $1000. She personally never uses it. The CEO's card only goes up to $3000. My boss said she didn't know how we were going to pay for the plane tickets since our cards would barely hold the room rates.

As it turns out, the conference is working to find another hotel to offer the room rates. But we're still going to need to charge around $5000 for the rooms and the plane tickets.

I started thinking… I could earn myself some points, with the credit card that I just paid off. But since I just snipped that card all to bits entering the contest at The Penny Saved not to long ago, I don't have the 3-digit number from the back of the card. I called Chase to see if they could give me that number, but of course they have no access to that number. Fraud protection purposes.

Drat.

Then I remembered that I hadn't cut up my other points card, although the balance is zero, because I don't charge anything on it.

Also, I knew I'd recently used one of these two points cards to buy something from Amazon.com and I hoped it wasn't this card, which I never use. You know how the card numbers are automatically in the checkout area at Amazon?

So I went there to look, and discovered that $26 had been charged recently. But I didn't think that sounded like the amount charged. So I had a look at the statement, and it was a yearly automatic payment that came through from Consumer Reports!! The payment was due by the 14th, but normally I don't check that account, since I don't use it!!

So I noticed they have alerts on the account, and at some point in time I actually set up those alerts to remind myself when a payment is due. It was then I noticed my alerts were being sent to an old email address that I haven't used in almost two years!! SCREAM!! It took some doing, but finally I found the place to change the address to where the alerts are sent. When I changed my main email address, the alert address did not changed!! Because I changed the main email address long ago.

Anyway, quite by accident, I managed to save us from a late payment. Whew. I'm going to set up email alerts AND phone alerts on this card.