A credit card arrived in the mail a few weeks ago from Bank of America. Mr. A asked me, “Since when are we banking with Bank of America?” I told him I must have an account with them, but I don’t use the account at all so I would be shredding the card. I didn’t quite get around to that, and I was glad because of what happened next.
Last weekend I was reconciling my checking account and I noticed that my credit union had not pulled my payment from my checking account in April. That concerned me so I went to the site and tried to log on to see what was going on. I couldn’t get logged on. Next I called the number on the back of my credit card and the woman I spoke to told me that my account had been switched over to Bank of America.
It was then that I remembered the Bank of America card that Mr. A had mentioned.
I explained that my payment had not been taken from my account in April, and she checked to find that I had not been charged a late fee. I was very glad to hear that since I hate getting late fees. Even though I’ve been pretty lucky over the years on the rare event that it does happen, the card holder has agreed to reverse the charges.
The representative said she would be happy to take my payment over the phone but since the payment wasn’t due until June 2nd, I told her I would like to hold off until I get registered with Bank of America online and would make the payment myself.
I’d seen the card recently in a stack of bills and started searching. In the meantime the woman was able to give me the credit card number so I tried to register, but no, of course they need all that other pertinent information like the expiration date, and the secret code from the back of the card.
I spent a few more minutes searching, and finally found the thing! I got myself registered and had a look around. I didn’t see anywhere to set up an automatic payment so I decided to log into my checking account and scheduled a check to be mailed to Bank of America.
I didn’t check my account for a couple of days, and last night I logged in to find that the overdraft option had kicked in. Drat! I hate when that happens, too! I never know if Wells Fargo is going to charge me. They didn’t used to, but nowadays it seems they charge $12.50 when processing an overdraft.
This should not have happened. I told Mr. A that we were down to $40 and although I had just deposited a check from his business to our account it wouldn’t available immediately. It probably won’t clear until Monday. So I started to look at the account to figure out what had happened to make us overdraft.
Apparently when Bank of America took over my credit union account credit card debt, they did go ahead and set up an automatic payment. Therefore we made two payments. One on the day I sent the check, and the next day when Bank of America took the payment via automatic payment.
Three things:
- I’m glad we have overdraft protection.
- Last night when examining our account I found that the April payment did indeed occur; it just was attributed to the wrong account and that is why it did not show up as a payment.
- We’ve squeaked out an extra payment to the credit card debt! Whoo!
Oh, the joys of personal finance.
Sometimes I feel a little overwhelmed with all the pitfalls of online banking and credit card accounts. I never feel really secure about my accounts and worry that I’m forgetting something important but I’m not sure what! Can anyone relate to that? All this technology isn’t making life easier — it’s making it more complicated!
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Marie at FamilyMoneyValues Reply:
May 20th, 2012 at 5:38 pm
I definitely relate to that! One of my greatest fears is that someone will get into the online accounts and suck the life out of them! We all have so many password and user id accounts of various sorts that it will be quite interesting to sort through when we die!
Keep a hand written record of them all – yeah, sure. I do try but it isn’t easy keeping up.
As far as a bank switching you over to a different institution without even letting you know – I consider that terrible customer service.
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Mrs. Accountability Reply:
May 20th, 2012 at 7:23 pm
Hi Marie, I guess they told me somewhere along the way! The representative I talked to told me I received an announcement letter in the mail but I get so many offers for credit cards and the credit cards I do have are always sending me junk mail with blank checks so I can go to Hawaii or buy a new car or whatever they are trying to entice me to buy on credit. So… I didn’t open the right envelope apparently.
Passwords are a real conundrum. It’s a bad bad idea to use the same one, but who can remember 200 different passwords? It’s maddening at times! Thanks for stopping by and commenting! ~Mrs. Accountability
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Mrs. Accountability Reply:
May 20th, 2012 at 7:20 pm
Deborah, I definitely agree that technology isn’t making my life simpler, it just seems to hog up more and more of my time. Thanks for visiting and commenting! ~Mrs. Accountability
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I just heard a commercial from some credit union advocacy group about how using your credit card from them is so much better than using a credit card from a bank. I’m assuming your credit union does not belong to that particular association! That’s completely absurd if you ask me.
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Mrs. Accountability Reply:
May 21st, 2012 at 12:18 pm
Money Beagle, as far as I know, they are not affiliated with Bank of America. If they are, it’s news to me. Maybe I should check into that… thanks.
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Interesting. My credit union also has its cards coming through one of the major banks. I don’t use them, because I get a pretty good cash kickback from American Express.
When the CU had an actual branch on GDU’s main campus, the manager there advised me not to allow a creditor to engross money from your account from their end. He said it’s REALLY hard to cancel that “service,” and that they’d had customers who had to fight creditors for months to get them to quit sponging monthly payments out of their checking accounts. He said insurance companies are the worst…and naturally, I have my long-term care insurance paid that way.
He said it’s best to use your bank’s or credit union’s bill-pay function, so that the creditor does not have the information needed to proactively extract money from your account. That way, too, YOU pay THEM, they don’t pay themselves with your money. At my CU, it’s easy to set up a recurring payment, so you don’t have to remember it every month.
Passwords. Ugh, how I hate them! There’s a site online (can’t recall the name) where you register and it creates scrambled passwords for you. You don’t have to keep typing passwords in to every site until you’re blue in the face. Haven’t tried it, though. What I do is keep a list of pw’s in Word, with coded clues to what sites they apply to — hints that only I would recognize. Since I can remember the usernames most of the time, those aren’t included in this document, so if someone ever hacked into the file, they’d have a time figuring out what sites the passwords apply to and what the usernames are. This lets me copy and paste the passwords into the sites. That’s a lot better than having to look them up in a hard-copy list! Mine is about 10 pages long, single-spaced.
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Mrs. Accountability Reply:
May 21st, 2012 at 12:22 pm
Funny, I had an experience with T-mobile a couple of years ago where they took a double payment from my account – I wrote about it on the blog. At that time, several of my readers suggested I not allow payments to be removed from my accounts, and for the most part I stopped that practice. But there have been a couple here and there that I allowed to take from my account.
I have another account where I’ve had $10 being taken every month, and I could have sworn I stopped that from happening, but the money keeps moving out. I keep thinking I need to go back and stop it – maybe I just thought that I did.
At any rate, I am going to go stop the Bank of America payment and have my bank issue a check. I have free Bill Pay. Thanks for the reminder.
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