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.
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.
This is more than mildly infuriating.
The principle, yeah. The fact that it’s 50 cents keeps it mild though
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.
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
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.
the equivalent of me telling the bank to write and mail a check to a company on my behalf.
What the fuck? Why don’t they just transfer the money electronically instead?
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.
Gotta love these legal monopolies sanctioned by our govt, right?
Right?
Having a fee of some sort based on payment option is probably desirable. They get charged those fees.
If they don’t expose the fee to you, they still charge the fee, or at least an average that covers their costs across all users, but it gets buried in a single price charged to all users, so you can’t choose whether or not to pay it.
Otherwise, the guys paying via their bank are subsidizing the guys paying via credit cards, even though they aren’t incurring the cost.
Except that this is a recent change so the cost is added onto the bill that must have surely covered said cost before.
Oh shush. We don’t want to learn how the world works or how to effectively navigate it. We just want everyone to give us free shit while not having jobs.
Seriously, I can go on for ages about how to manipulate capitalistic systems for our own benefit. Nope. “Kill the capitalists!” OK. Then a system by another name will abuse you instead.
While we’re at it, if you’re not a business with special banking needs, why is anyone using a filthy bank?! Credit unions are the dictionary definition of socialism.
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.
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”
Yep, this is what peak fReEdoM looks like.
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.
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
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
No, fuck even SLIGHTLY thinking it’s ok because it’s only 50 cents. Next month it’ll be 75cents, then a dollar… it ONLY goes up, do not normalize bullshit fees because ‘its only 50 cents’
Taking online payments costs the receiver money. You OK with making everyone pay more to level it out? Or, you can use you bank to send an electronic check for free. You do you.
It costs less money than hosting a payment processing center. By an order of magnitude.
I never let any company know my card details, I use privacy.com to make a fake card and pay them and then put it on hold so if they try auto charging me when I don’t want it, the card just gets denied.
Use Bill Pay from your bank/credit union to mail them a check (without even paying postage yourself)
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.
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.
It’s fun arguing with companies that claim they can’t send paper bills anymore.
- pay online fee: $2.50
- Paper bill/pay by check fee: $5.00.
I made the numbers up as I don’t recall them offhand but my energy company effectively has this policy now. :/
They’re required to have some method of payment that doesn’t involve additional fees. Ironically, it’s usually the method that involves the most work for their employees.
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.
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.
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.
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 .
Visa debits cards can be used as a credit card, but debits from your bank. Added bonus is that you get fraud protections that your bank may not offer for debit transactions.
Edit: that is not to downplay that you said you were in a tight spot.
Now that is the first real bullshit I’ve seen on this thread.
Gotta do what you gotta do 🤷♂️
Pay all of your bills in person in pennies from now on.
Bill pay through your bank. Fuck their payment processor.
When an old landlord pulled some bullshit on me, I paid a month’s rent with 31 paper checks, delivered once a day, direct from my bank.
That is some genuine malicious compliance. ❤️
