Power company oursourced their payments. Every method except autopay now has a fee
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.
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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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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 👍
This is more than mildly infuriating.
The principle, yeah. The fact that it's 50 cents keeps it mild though
My landlord gave me the option of paying online. For an additional $10.00 fee.
edit =added the cost.
"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
Oh God, if anything they're even worse. Same page, friend.
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.
No, it costs the tenants.
I edited my original comment.
It was $10.00. My landlord is a fairly big operation with several multi-floor apartment buildings.
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.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Householder
https://www.stateofficialtwo.com/
"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.
Yep, this is what peak fReEdoM looks like.
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.
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.
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.
What the fuck? Why don't they just transfer the money electronically instead?
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
Canyou mail a check?
Some banks will do autopay. The bank obtains the bill and mails a check.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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%
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.
We have this in Florida. Haven't signed on as I'm continually trying to slash my bill, get more eco friendly.
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 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.
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.
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.
Why would you not want automatic payment?
For me, telecom companies just randomly jack the costs and hope you don't look. I've caught them constantly adding $20 to my set rate and claim 'oh this special promotion ended' when I don't even have promotions.
Never trust companies to just take your money without looking at the invoice.
They aren’t allowed to just do that. Being allowed to directly withdraw money from customers accounts who authorized it is a privilege, one that banks can withdraw if they find a company abuses it.
If you accidentally overdraft your account the bank charges you a bs $45 fee
Dafuq. Glad that’s not a thing here.
Data breaches expose your banking numbers
So? It’s not like they are a secret. What are any potential hackers going to to with my bank account numbers? Send me money?
They're also not public info, either. Typically they're combined with name, address, etc for fraud protection, but those details are even easier to acquire than account numbers. The routing numbers are public information, though. In the result of a data breach, a bad actor has everything they need.
Just about anything they want since they'll likely have your personal details too. When adding a bank account to any of my utility payment accounts, there is no verification whatsoever; enter details, authorize payment.
I don't use CashApp and the like, but in the past, PayPal would deposit a few cents into the account, and you had to verify ownership of the account by entering those random amounts into the signup form to complete the process. That's also trivially defeated if enough of your data was breached and in the hands of an attacker (e.g. call the bank, pretend to be you, and ask for the info).
Not to mention, why would attackers in phishing/scam emails ask for bank details if they're not secret or are useless?
Maybe that’s true if you live in a country with an archaic banking system. Here in Europe, you can do nothing with just my IBAN (International Bank Account Number) other than send me money. Anything else requires multi-step verification.
And where do you guess OP lives?
Nope. Try saying something relevant next time.
NewsflashL: the world does not revolve around the US.
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Give me your bank account number right now then?
Yeah, I didn’t think so.
Your comment is pure cope because you realize deep down the danger you put yourself in.
I won't share it because it could be used to link my Lemmy account to my real life identity, not because you could use it to access my account.
If it was such a secret and sensitive number, why does every company blast it all over the place? Pretty much every company will have their bank account number in their letterhead and on the 'contact information' page of their website.
Here is a list of all bank account numbers used by the Dutch tax service (the Dutch equivalent of the IRS). Should be plenty of money in those accounts.
Is this also not a good reason to not set up auto pay in the case of data breaches? Sure it may not be connected to your lemmy account, but does no other personal info about you link to that data?
No.
That personal data is already in their system whether or not I use autopay. I’m pretty sure my mortgage provider has my name and address on file. So does the energy company, my internet provider, etc.
Also, not doing automatic payments doesn’t even prevent them from having my bank account number. If I manually transfer the money they can see the source account number.