During the last two weeks I have been dinged for $69.00 in late fees and I'm mad! I received three $10.00 late fees from my insurance company. I have two policies [auto and home] and for some reason they billed me three times. I guess the third one had something to do with the purchase of the minivan. What makes me so mad about these three fees is I had gone online in May and setup automatic payments from my checking account. The insurance company allows me to split my semi annual premiums into smaller chunks but the have a service charge unless you setup automatic debits...so I play their game and setup automatic debits. Now I have bigger and better fees.
The other late fee was on a credit card and was our fault because we must have missed placed the bill so it didn't get paid. Usually I setup a payment through my credit union's billpay service when I receive a bill even if I don't want to pay it until a latter date [like payday]. Some how it was lost even before I had a chance to add it to the billpay service. Dang it!
What am I going to do about these fees? I'm going to ask for them back. I'm hoping that the credit card company sees me as a good customer and will waive this fee for me. The insurance company will receive scathing barbs and condescending lecturing as well as threats to take my business elsewhere. Which I just might do anyway.
How am I going to avoid these fees in the future? I'm going to setup a recurring minimum payment for the credit card through the billpay service. With the insurance payment I'm going to trust [hope] that they will process my automatic debit correctly after I berate them profusely. I have also setup recurring payments for my mortgage and auto loans just to be safe.
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