A really scary thing happened to me yesterday.
Usually I'm in charge of the financial admin matters. So if there's a credit card bill, it's my responsibility to arrange for it to get paid for both my card or my wife's card.
And of course I know how important it is to pay my bills on time.
We all know that we are here to use credit cards for their convenience and rebates.
And we aren't really supposed to induce spending just to get rebates and/or cashback...
Anyway, long story short. I forgot to pay the Amex bill for my wife's credit card.
It's the first time I ever forgot to pay any bill so I was pretty stunned.
Cos my habit, is immediately, when I get any bill, I check it, and place it on the laptop, so that I can immediately pay it when I turn on the laptop. So this process has work for years.
I had some issue with Amex rebates the past few months, so last month I put the bill on the desk to do some calculations and it was mixed with other documents and basically I forgot to pay it.
The additional charges were stunning.
I forgot to pay a $276 bill.
I got slapped a $90 late payment fee and $10.12 interest charge.
THAT is quite SICK. $100.12 extra charges on missing a $276 payment. Around 36%.
I never knew it was so much..
Anyway, my wife called them and they were nice enough to waive the charges cos we were a first time offender.
But I learnt a lesson here.
It's really really expensive to miss payments.
I really shouldn't be distracted by other issues when paying credit card bills. I should pay them first before trying to work out whatever other issues I have with the rebates.
Cos once we are late with bill payments. Then the credit card company can slap all those charges on us.
And we can't really do much about it if they don't want to waive off the charges.
If they weren't willing to waive the charges, at best, I was thinking that we will pay the bills, but leave out the additional charges and cancel the card.
We were pretty much prepared to say, "Hey, I'm going to pay what I'm due, but I'm not going to pay all your finance charges. And you can just cancel the card. Too bad."
Problem with this is that it would likely affect her credit rating so it's not really a good thing.
So of course we don't want to go there if it's possible.
I think there may be risk that such incidences would occur again in future. Cos many cards are switching to online statements. This pretty much places the responsibility for me/customers to check the bill instead of the bill coming to me. Furthermore, I cannot put the bill on my laptop as a reminder to pay the bill.
It's highly likely that I'll receive the usual sms from a bank "Your electronic statement is ready for viewing", this will happen in the middle of the day. I could be out or doing something... Then when I get home, I have a good chance of forgetting to check my online account.
Anyone has any good ideas? Or how do you remember to check your online statements? Especially for those cards which you don't use regularly.
For example, I don't use my Citibank card regularly. Since I don't use it on a regular basis, I don't bother to check online statements. I will only check it on months that I use the card. BUT the problem is that IF they charge me the annual fee, I also won't notice it when the annual fee comes along. This could go on for months before I realize it and this would mean months of late payment and interest charges.
Of course by then I would just simply cancel the card, but I'd rather not have to do that if possible.
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