I understand returned payment fees for checks, but I’ve never been charged for having a credit card decline.
Stupid of me to sign up for auto-payment when I use my credit card for gas, I guess.
It’s expensive being poor. I used to get charged £15 if I didn’t have the funds because I wasn’t allowed an overdraft. Being unable to pay £5 left me with £-8 frequently. Because apparently I was allowed an overdraft if they did it to me.
When I was doing Amazon Turk - had like $10 to my name, I accidentally clicked on “withdraw funds” instead of “deposit funds” for the $15 I’d spent ten hours earning.
Bank of America charged me $35 for the “overdraft.”
Disabling overdraft is the first thing people should do when opening a bank account. It’s extremely predatory.
Wells Fargo made a lot of money on ‘Sort Order Optimization’
Say you have $100 in your bank account. You buy a candy bar for $2 from a vending machine, a coke for another $2, fill up $20 worth of gas, and then spend $100 on groceries. You’d think one overdraft charge, for the groceries, right?
Nope. The groceries will be taken out first, then the gas, then the candy bar and coke. Three overdraft charges.
It’s expensive being poor - and they knew that:
“Given our dependence on a small set of OD consumers (4% generate 40% of total OD/NSF revenue),” Zimmerman wrote, “a small change in behavior within this group can cause a large change in revenue.”
That is so fucked up
And is now illegal, thankfully.
For the next couple weeks, I’m sure. The financials are watching all the axes being taken to regulation in the industrial sector and I’m sure they’re gonna want in on that scene at some point.
I hope you are with a local or regional credit union now.
Yep! I actually closed my account pretty much immediately afterwards, and went with a local credit union which has been consistently great! They gave me a really good rate when I needed a car loan, have floated me if I was a little short before my direct deposit came in…
Glad to hear it. This is one of the best “small things” you can help people with, in my opinion. BofA is so predatory. I switched to a credit union here in Seattle from them years ago. It was literally the first time I actually earned money in savings rather than it be melted away by fees.
I used to be a contractor and was sometimes bad at processing timesheets and invoices.
I had one occasion where I had (numbers made up because it was ages ago) £100 in the business bank account with no overdraft facility when a £150 payment went out.
The payment went out putting me overdrawn. They waited a day before deciding that I wasn’t allowed an overdraft and putting the money back.
During that 24 hour period a payment for £25 was processed and blocked because I was overdrawn.
They then charged me two fees for refusing the payments even though I had money for the second one in the bank.
I switched banks right after that.
I’m decades old. The lesson I learned over decades is to NEVER sign up for autopay. NEVER. THERE’S NOT A COMPANY OUT THERE THAT BUGS YOU FOR AUTO PAY THAT WON’T ABUSE YOU.
Totally get this in concept, but I’d be paying more in late fees without autopay
Just spend the ten minutes once a month to pay from your bank using the payment service.
“Just”
Thanks I’m curedIt is non-trivial to set a reliable reminder for some, and not due to laziness, just how brains are wired. Set a calendar reminder, you start ignoring it after a few months. Start an alarm, you start snoozing it early. Put a note on the fridge, it eventually becomes invisible. Not impossible to overcome, but also, as I started, non-trivial to solve.
Bill pay pushed from your bank account is okay – you can get even set up limits where it’ll cancel the payment if a bill is unexpectedly large.
Letting creditors pull from your bank account is what isn’t okay.
Yeah, this is a hard lesson everyone should take to heart.
Edit: to add, most banks will allow you to set up automatic payments to go out to companies. This is a far better method because it doesn’t put your finances in the hands of an unscrupulous corporation. (Well, other than your bank but those are the dice we roll)
What if I’ve been paying for years without incident? There’s a thing where I can do autopay for mobile (Canada) where it’s $10 off the bill. I always hate the idea of autopay but they’ve never overcharged a bill…so far. By years I mean it’s been over a decade now.
Mostly curious if your stance still says no to this situation as well. I’ll guess yes, but still it’s $10 a month so adds up to almost a fast food meal these days lol.
For no perks I definitely agree, I pay my crap on time and takes like 5 mins a month to pay online.
returned
Yeah, I was thinking of editing my comment regarding this - lots of companies have started charging fees if you DONT use autopay. (They can call it a discount all they want, but the price you’re paying with autopay is the price. They’re really charging you a fee if you don’t.) Practically speaking, it is likely cheaper if you pay 1 overdraft fee a year than paying $10 a month for manual payment. But, I’m a crotchety old stubborn man who somehow has the idea he can change a giant corporation by giving them a fake middle finger.
That text looks like a scam
As does the end of our conversation.
Fuck Cox.
Cox is really living up to their namesake of being a bunch of dicks.
You are also getting Max subscription plan with this, This will completely boost up your internet speed and you will be amazed by the higher speed and smooth service.
Oh, so smooth. Doubling that arbitrary throughout limit will obviously improve latency and jitter. I always have my network fully saturated all day, every day /s
Everything will be super fast and when you stream or browse there will be no buffering or interruptions and you will have a great experience
Yes, because buffering is caused by your inability to download 62 more megabytes of video a second. It’s totally not because the server isn’t sending video fast enough or anything. Fucking slimeball.
I’m not even getting the 500 I’m paying for already!
I would say it’s worth a complaint that you’re barely getting a tenth of the speed you’re paying for, but with cable/broadband, there’s a million and one potential causes for throughput being degraded and Cox customer support is useless.
Is the node saturated? Is there a coaxial splitter in your wall blocking high-frequency signals? Is the run from the node to your house too long or noisy? What about the run from your house to the DOCSIS modem? Is there interference somewhere? Are there coaxial ports unnecessarily connected and degrading the signal? Did they just bond the minimum number of channels to reach the theoretical maximum of 500 Mbps under perfect conditions?
Who knows! Cox doesn’t know, and Cox doesn’t care. But hey, maybe you can be tricked into spending another $20 for even more unfulfilled promises!
Literally every cable company is a scam.
It’s been a bait-and-switch ever since it stopped being “Community Antenna TV” and they started showing ads on non-OTA channels.
Yeah that checks out. I’ve found out about this in a doubly infuriating scenario.
I was home abroad on a holiday, and they billed me for my regular monthly service. So naturally, i got slapped with the 25$ rejection fee, and then my bank decided to pay the overdraft on the second attempt, resulting in another 45$ in bank fees for that too.
Everything in the US is purposefully designed to fuck you over.
You have to opt in to overdraft protection and fees. Its not designed to fuck you over. You literally signed up for the service and can cancel it at any time.
Verizon…manually go in every month to OK the funds come straight from checking. Been using the same account for over 20 years and it is SAVED on the Verizon site… Have plenty of money in the account, then one month it gets rejected for “account not found”. Bank says they never even tried and i hit re-submit and it goes through no problem. Clearly a problem with Verizon’s payment processing right? But they charge me a $30 “returned” fee and when I reach out to them they wont budge on it.
Verizon one day stopped charging me and canceled my internet out of nowhere. It was coming straight from my checking on auto pay. Then I couldn’t access my account to set it up again and it made it hell to get it back up again. Not sure what was going on
I’m a Cox customer only because I have no better options.
This is by design. It’s called a mini-monopoly and our government should have put a stop to is 50 years ago.
I suppose with Cox we could be talking about TV or Internet. If it’s Internet I’ve heard it called a duopoly. The cable TV company and phone company both had wires running to every house when the internet showed up on the scene. Typically these are the only two options available in an area, and when you zoom in further usually one of them has given up on a particular street or neighborhood, and you better just go with the one that has decent wires.
We sort of had protections in place at the phone company level for a while to stop this. ILEC and CLEC laws forced Incumbent Local Exchange Carriers (the big phone co in the area, owns the lines on the poles) to share their last mile phone lines with a Competitive LEC, granted the CLEC shells up for their own equipment and puts it in a special section of the ILECs central offices. Bam, competition.
The problem is that the laws only specified copper, so when fiber rolled around, ILECs specifically targeted their upgrades to cripple the competition. The houses still would do DSL on copper, but the backhaul for the CO would get upgraded to fiber and the competition would have to also upgrade their handoff on their equipment to be fiber or just lose all their customers in the area. They would also set up fiber fed cabinets halfway closer to your house and offer VDSL. CLECs weren’t allowed in those cabinets and could only offer 1/5th the speed on regular old ADSL due to distance. There were a lot of dirty tricks…the laws that were supposed to help just let the big company absolutely batter the smaller ones once they started their fiber upgrades.
Same for Verizon. Or if your bank account doesn’t have enough funds. Or even if it does, and your bank says the transaction never happened, as long as Verizon says it happened, they charge you a fee.
That’s fucking wild. I have two cards that are occasionally declined because they want to make sure I’m making the transaction. I can afford it but I’d be pissed paying a fee because my credit card company suspected I might not be the one wanting to upgrade to a second phone or whatever.
They blacklisted my bank account and wouldn’t allow me to add another. So I paid off my devices and switched to Mint mobile. I’m saving $150 a month. And my coverage is better.
Time to cancel cox. 👍
My landlord charged me $250 for replacement of the original shower head through an “expert” (i used my own and didn’t fasten the hose enough on moving out). 😢
TWN did that to me too. My card expired and I called to give them the new number. They ran it without the new expiration date because the numbers were identical.
