Why do I have to pay a "convenience fee" in order for my payment to be on time?

[alarimer]

This just irks me. I log in to my Dell account to make a payment (due on the 10th, today is the 9th). But apparently Dell would not receive it until the 12th. HUH? I am using my checking account to pay this online. But I could pay it instantly for a fee of 9.95. Which I agreed to because it is cheaper than the $30 they charge for being late. My debit card is debited immediately when I use it at the store. Why does it take Dell two more days? Does it take two days for electronic money to get to Delhi? Credit card companies suck.

[Lil Missy]

1. It's a predatory practice that irks me too. Welcome to the bush world.

The other thing that bugs me is that when I make a deposit at the bank a day or two before bills are due, they wait a couple days to credit my deposit, and run the bills first, nicking me with an overdraft charge. On the same day! Within minutes!

Crooked bastards.

[ghostsofgiants]

31. Not just the Bush world.

Welcome to capitalism. It's a way to make extra profit.

[Lasher]

2. This is a ripoff.

Banks prey on you like this too. Let just one check bounce and you'll find out.

See if you can set up your Dell account so that payments are automatically taken out of your checking account a couple of days before the due date. That way your payments are always going to be on time, but never early. I do that with all my bills and download my bank transactions into Quicken, which is a big time saver.

But my bank charges a fee for online access to my account. :-(

[havocmom]

3. Your bank charges for online access? CHANGE BANKS!

seriously

[alarimer]

5. This wasn't the bank.

I paid that bill at the Dell website. Aside from being incredibly hard to navigate, this fee thing just pissed me off.

[havocmom]

12. My reply was to other person who said bank charges for internet access

I understood your OP but was responding to another person on the thread.

[Lasher]

14. It's difficult to change because of the banking oligopoly.

Thanks to deregulation, most of the banks around here were acquired by BB&T some years back. And remember when they first put in ATMs, and banks were able to increase profits by reducing their workforce? At first there were no foreign ATM fees. But by now, thanks to the blessings of the invisible hand, if I dare make a transaction at a non-BB&T machine, I get hit with a fee by the foreign ATM's bank, and also by BB&T when they process the transaction.

So I could conceivably shop around to find a bank that does not charge for online access to my accounts. But then I would end up getting killed by fees because it's hard to find a non-BB&T ATM in my area. Or I could go that extra distance to make withdrawals and deposits at my new home bank but then we'd be talking extra gas money.

I appreciate the advice all the same.

[yellowdogintexas]

27. check out the local credit unions. Ours gives totally free on line banking

they do charge a small line $3 monthly service fee IF you go with no activity, which I found out with my second bank account because I don't use it very often for online payments. So I fixed that by using it to pay certain bills monthly

I got hit with one of those convenience fees when I paid a gasoline bill on the company website to get the balance cleared out so my spouse could buy gas on the road (the card at the time had a ridiculously low credit limit and he would max it before I even received the bills. solved that by just sending them a certain amount of money weekly so it constantly freed up money on the account and ultimately the credit limit automatically increased so it is no longer an issue.

[Lasher]

28. Thank you for the advice but there would be a problem with ATM access as I described above.

It is my hope that someday foreign ATM fees will be outlawed.

[Lasher]

13. Yes, I'm aware of that.

But my point was, there are no fees associated with automatic bill pay, so you could ue it in the future avoid a charge such as you described.

[Connonym]

4. I discovered something about my credit card this week that really pissed me off

A couple of months ago I was a day late in making my payment. The late fee put me over my limit. So being 1 day late cost me about 80 bucks. Ouch. Okay, I was at fault should have made the payment the right day but this is the part that really frakkin' kills me. After I made my payment (and I paid twice the minimum due) when the put on the finance charges for this month it took me over my limit again and they charged me $39 bucks AGAIN for over limit fee. Did they tell me that paying my minimum payment (which I actually doubled) wouldn't put me in the clear for not getting an over limit charge the next month. Hell no they didn't. So now being 1 day late on my payment has cost me almost 120 bucks in penalties. I'm furious about this and I wrote them telling them that it may be legal but it's immoral and "what's in 'my' pocket" won't be capital 1 once I get this stupid thing paid off (which has become a priority). It's virtually impossible to not keep a credit card -- you can't rent a hotel or a car without one. They've got us by the short hairs and they keep pulling. I can feel my blood pressure going up while I write this. How did our congress, the one that supposedly represents US! allow the laws to change so that credit cards could gouge us this way? I don't want to believe they're all a bunch of corporate shills but it sure as hell looks like it. To make matters worse they've changed bankruptcy laws that favor the creditors. Funny how corporations can go in and out of bankruptcy with no lasting effects on their reputation but if as an individual you're in trouble you're fucking screwed needing a sysiphean effort to get your ass out of that sling. I wish there was a way to opt out of all this bullshit and live on a cash-only basis. I hate being under their control.

[alarimer]

6. I hate Capital One.

They raised my rates from 9.99 to 15.99% but gave me the choice to opt out from that rate increase. The only catch was that my account would be frozen and no longer available to use. But at least now I am paying it down and did not have to get a personal loan or transfer the balance.

The fees are ridiculous. I have to pay a special fee in order to pay by phone but online it's free. Now why would that be? It comes from the same place- direct from my checking account.

[Lyric]

16. Hey there Connie. It really is possible to live without a credit card.

ThinkBlue1966 and I have never had a single credit card, ever. What we have are "prepaid" Visa and Mastercard cards. I don't know if they'll work for renting a car (probably not, unless you're going to pre-load it with enough to cover the rental company's enormous temporary "hold") but I can personally attest that they DO work for reserving hotel rooms. So long as you pre-load your card with enough money to cover the cost of your reservation plus the $50--$100 temporary hold that most hotels place in order to cover any "extras" (like room service charges, phone call costs, etc.) a pre-paid Mastercard or Visa will work just fine for that.

We stayed at the Best Western beside Busch Gardens in Tampa, Florida for over a week with a prepaid Mastercard two years ago, and the only problem we had was that when we checked out, it took a full day for the hotel to release the extra "hold", which meant we were stuck with very little gas money available for the drive home. We'd made the mistake of loading the hotel money and the gas money onto the same card. So if you ever decide to try a prepaid card for a hotel, make sure that there's no other cash on the card that you might need immediately after checkout, because it takes a day or two for the hold to get released.

Prepaids also work like a charm for everything else--online bill paying, online shopping, subscription services, etc.

:hi:

[Connonym]

18. I didn't know that

thanks for giving me that info. I'm going to first focus on paying off this measly 1000 credit card debt and then I'm going to get out of the whole business of letting then screw me over. I didn't know that option was out there. Thanks :) I'll be so happy to tell them to ef off!

[Lydia Leftcoast]

22. I hate Capital One because they keep changing the due dates

The monthly payment can be due any time between the 3rd and the 9th, and I have to check my statement carefully each month.

I'm trying to pay them off as fast as possible, the sneaky, oily bastards.

[DS1]

26. you can't rent a hotel or a car without one

I do it all the time. They take debit cards now, some places just put a hold on x amount of dollars for their own coverage, but it's released when you finalize the transaction. I know about the horror stories about the release taking 10 days, but I've never experienced that

[khashka]

32. I hate Discover card

I always paid on time. Except once. Granted there was a large charge ($900) for a dental emergency. And then I lost my job. 2 days after the due date I get a phone call at 3 am. "Why haven't you paid your bill?" "I lost my job, but I'll do it as quickly as possible." "Who authorized you to use this card for dental work?" "You? Gave me the card and allowed my dentist to accept it." "Don't worry about the money, just send us your teeth."

I cried all night and vowed they would never see a damn dime of that bill. What they did was illegal, but who do you go to? I did pay it off and cancelled my card. The vicious fucks.

Khash.

[hobbit709]

7. Because all those "fees" increase their profit margin without added expenses to them.

[BrklynLib at work]

8. Sadly, there are several companies that charge a fee for online payments...

If they don't get you one way, they will get you another. Credit cards/banks are the biggest crooks out there. Nowadays, if you are late paying your gas or electric bill, there are credit card companies that feel justified in raising your APR!!

[Blue Diadem]

9. Our mortgage company charges an automatic payment fee.

We have it set up to be paid monthly and there's a $5.00 monthly fee for the mortgage company to do that. It really ticks me off, but I don't like mailing payments and having them set on some desk somewhere. We had that happen once with a CC saying they didn't get our payment that we'd mailed some 15 days prior.

[BrklynLib at work]

10. That is pretty crappy. They should give you a discount for doing it that way!!

[Blue Diadem]

11. I was really shocked

and ticked off. That money should go to pay down our principal instead of boosting their profits. I mentioned it to my son after they bought their house last year, they have a different mortgage company and it's the same way.

IIRC, years ago we were offered 1/4% lower rate on a home loan for having automatic payments.

[Lasher]

15. There was a utility that wanted to charge me for setting up automatic payments with them.

But I got around it. Seems like they would charge if they took it from my debit card, but I asked questions and found that if I had it taken directly out of checking by furnishing my accound and routing numbers, it was free.

We need a boatload of banking regulations, and outlawing fees for automatic bill payments should be one of them.

[Blue Diadem]

19. Yes we do need more regulations. It seems fees have gone

wild since this administration got in.

I'm going to double check our mortgage billing. I'm quite sure we set it up like our others, with routing and account # for checking.

You know, I think back to when we had our first automatic bill pay set up, 1980 for a monthly insurance payment. They encouraged us to set it up that way saying it was a convenience for them with less paperwork to process and it enabled them to give us a discount on our premiums.

[yellowdogintexas]

25. see if moving the draft date back a couple of days eliminates that fee

some companies give that free if it is in first 5 days of month.

[SouthoftheBorderPaul]

17. Someone wrote a book about these predatory practices

http://www.gotchacapitalism.com/

[BrklynLib at work]

20. Thanks for the link.

[alarimer]

21. I think I've seen him on some talk show or something.

Maybe on Now.

Looks like a good book to read. I would pay this bill with my online bill pay through the bank but it turns out that it still takes 5 days because they allegedly cannot set up an electronic payment and actually have to send a check. Hard to believe in this day and age.

[Orrex]

23. It's a double F-U, too

When you do an online payment like that, it's processed via ACH, which is effectively free for the credit card company.

Explain to me why I have to pay $9.95 for a process that involves no human intervention, but when I mail a check that has to be opened, verified, and manually applied to my account, there's no fee?


It's bullshit, of course. They might as readily charge a $30 convenience fee and tell you that it's better than the late fee because it won't adversely affect your credit.

[baldguy]

24. Isn't deregulation wonderful?

[Jamastiene]

29. Progress Energy does that to me on the phone.

I always have to be extra careful with the automated system. It will ask whether I want it to be paid right now or wait until tomorrow. Like anyone is going to pick that option and be late? You gotta pay the service charge either way. :shrug:

[cemaphonic]

30. Here's the one that kills me

I opened a 529 (a tax sheltered vehicle for college savings) account for my son and set up a monthly payment system into it. I was late one month, and they charged me a late fee *for money that I don't actually owe anyone.* Plus they use one of those cheapo coupon payment systems instead of actually mailing you a bill, so it is pretty easy to forget until it's late. Damned chiseling pikers. We seriously need some regulations on the whole financial services industry. Preferably involving ants, honey and stakes.