Insurance pulls automatically from my account at the end of the month. Didn’t realize the exact time because I haven’t had serious money issues in years until now. Bank account in the red, still need food… Pull from a retirement account to just add a cushion again. This has been a downward trend for years now and it’s only been getting worse no matter who was in charge.
This hits home today. Just got charged double for a gym membership out of the blue (getting charged even once is bad enough since I don’t really use it). Weekend, no one can help. Money is already gone from my account. Busy AF during working hours this week, but add this on to shit I need to take care of. I’ll also point out that this is a place where businesses will now let me talk to their AI for 20min of complete nonproductivity, but I can’t arm myself with an Ai to take my side because I’m never going to give one access to my credit card info to be able to even discuss this.
This is why I generally push bills instead of letting them pull. Yeah, it’s a bit of a chore to go in and change amounts every month, but if I forget, the default will probably overpay the bill slightly.
And I don’t have to worry about the electric company deciding they want to randomly pull $1200 this month.
I like the idea of that but in this subscription based life it’s just so many to keep track of and time is an extremely limited resource for me.
I view as it keeping me frugal. If the trouble of going in and paying for it every month isint worth the trouble then I shouldnt get the service and save the money instead
Never NEVER put a subscription on a debit card!
If possible use the temp/security credit card numbers that some banks will give you for free.
Dude…I opened a Lowes Consumer Credit Card recently. This is operated by Synchrony Bank.
I didn’t need the credit, I just wanted the discount. And being able to spread it out for no interest is nice too. I’ll take free money…sure…with how inflation is?
I had like $1000 worth of tools and materials to buy for a project. Realized that the discount promo was only on first $500. Split the cart almost perfectly and ran the first half through, no problem.
Second cart comes through and it’s declined…fraud alert.
I call and I’m told there was an “excessive amount of pre-authorizations”, which I can only assume comes from Lowes’ incredibly shitty website sending out preauth every time I modified the cart.
Anyways get that settled and I check out. Cool…now I can just wait for stuff to come in, right?
Wrong. Next morning I’m getting emails like every 30 seconds saying there’s something wrong with my account, a transaction was declined, we need another card, my order has changed, etc.
Come to find out, the store kept modifying the order when they were scanning it, to fit what they actually had in stock vs. what needed to be shipped. All of this registered as activity on the card, which got me locked for fraud again.
This time, I call them, and they tell me that they can’t do anything, the account is locked until I do their identity verification process where they have me go to an app and upload a video of my face and drivers license.
Like, fuck you, I don’t want your credit card enough to do that. And I tell them such. So alternatively they can (snail) mail me a letter with a code and I call back with it. Takes like a week.
Except I never got that letter. As soon as I got off the phone with them I started cancelling everything I could that hadn’t been delivered or shipped yet and left for HD.
Eventually I got the bill for that credit card…about half the stuff went through it.
I’ve got massive ADHD and it’s not in my regular bills yet, so naturally I wait till the due date to actually pay it.
Go to create an account and…“your account is locked, please call customer support”.
Alright…here we go again. Call in, agent can’t help. Transfers me to security. I give him the whole story. He sends me a code by email. I give it to him. Account is fully unlocked.
Awesome now I can get into the account. Aaaaand only like $12 of the balance got the 0% offer. The other $600 or so went on regular rotating.
Fuck it. I paid off the balance and shredded the card. I’m not dealing with that crap again.
Literally spent almost an entire day on the phone between Syf, Lowes.com, and the two different stores that ended up fulfilling my order.
Total clusterfuck.
In 2-4 business weeks they’ll fix it.
If lucky, and you paid it. Because if you didn’t will get a fine on top too. Oh boy if you don’t pay that too!
An hour? That’s cute. In a legal struggle with my idiot electricity provider for 3 months and ongoing now. No end in sight yet.
The good old ADHD tax
It’s their world, we’re just living in it.
