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.
This is more than mildly infuriating.
Canyou mail a check?
Some banks will do autopay. The bank obtains the bill and mails a check.
Use Bill Pay from your bank/credit union to mail them a check (without even paying postage yourself)
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.
- 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. :/
It’s fun arguing with companies that claim they can’t send paper bills anymore.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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. ❤️
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 👍
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”
Edit: just to be clear, I’m not mocking OP.
My landlord gave me the option of paying online. For an additional fee.
“I’ll pay online without the additional fee.”
“We’re not renewing your lease.” Or better yet, “Please sign your new lease, at the additional $1200 market rate per month, or kindly vacate by the 1st.”
Hope you can get time off work and have the friends and money to relocate so you can enjoy another 12 months of Freedom™ from living on the street!
Hence why every reasonable jurisdiction should have tenancy tenure and rent control laws
Housing costs are such a racket.
If we’re talking about rackets, I got a bone to pick with the insurance industry too
Another sovereign citizen
Well, yeah? It costs the landlord to take online payments. Should they spread that cost to other people who choose to pay differently?
Use your bank, or hopefully your credit union, to send a check. There. Neither of you are out a single dime, no hassle for either party.
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.
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.
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 .
Gotta do what you gotta do 🤷♂️
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.
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
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.
Pay all of your bills in person in pennies from now on.
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.
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.
