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.
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 .
Now that is the first real bullshit I’ve seen on this thread.
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.
Gotta do what you gotta do 🤷♂️
This is more than mildly infuriating.
The principle, yeah. The fact that it’s 50 cents keeps it mild though
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.
In my country we have free ‘autopay’ on the banks end. You simply setup the details of the recurring transaction in your mobile app or on the website and it will automatically start paying.
Seems like you should say “fuck modern capitalism” instead.
The problem here is that your bill is based on usage so there’s no way to know exactly what your bill will be each month in order to set up an automatic bill pay.
My variable (usage-based) utility bills are sent as “e-bills” to my bank, so the bank’s bill pay system can pay them anyway. I can even set it up to pay in full up to some limit, so it doesn’t blindly pay if the bill is outrageous due to some mistake.
The power companies in my country use a monthly average of the yearly costs. You’ll always pay the same.
Where I live in the states, my power company offers an option to do the same thing. And every year, they adjust it based on overages/underages from the previous year.
Yep exactly. It works pretty nice here. Except for a power crisis we had a few years ago, where they had to change stuff of contracts around because the price went up by almost 300%
We have this in Florida. Haven’t signed on as I’m continually trying to slash my bill, get more eco friendly.
Until they realize the average wasent enough and hand you a massive bill at the end of the year.
My country has rules and regulations to prevent this. The averages are pretty accurate. Our government also requires electricity companies to offer an easy way for customers to see how much energy they have used and how close it is to the estimated average.
Anyways, we also have variable contracts where you pay monthly for the energy you have used depending on your use and the price of energy on the market. For this we can simply use payment mandates that are easy to setup between yourself, the bank and the company. Keep in mind our companies are not capitalistic overlords and don’t try to steal our money using this, so it’s pretty safe and easy.
LOL, no. Are you just making up hypothetical scenarios? FFS, even our crappy, private power company doesn’t pull that shit, even in Florida.
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?
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.
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.
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Pay all of your bills in person in pennies from now on.
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.
Use Bill Pay from your bank/credit union to mail them a check (without even paying postage yourself)
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.
Would be nice, but where I live less than a fifth of days in the year are sunny on average.
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.
I’m sorry, we don’t accept money any more
- 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.
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.
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.
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.
Canyou mail a check?
Some banks will do autopay. The bank obtains the bill and mails a check.
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.
Pay by mailing in paper checks to maximize their costs.
That maximizes my costs as well (plus hassle). I don’t even own a checkbook.
Your bank mails the checks for you for free, I haven’t owned a checkbook in a decade.
Harry needs checks to pay his “action bills”
If they’re going to cost me money being stupid, I’ll do it back to them.
Doing good work out there 👍
They do that here, unless you pay at the county offices. Yep, either we pay the fee individually or collectively, and they don’t even reimburse the county.
