Today, I came home to a nice letter from Discover informing me that I forgot to pay them last month. This was naturally a total surprise to me, seeing as I distinctly remember making a trip to Sears to pay them by check at the beginning of October. Why Sears instead of just paying online? Because when my car got broken into, they stole my financial documents, including my Discover card statements, so I changed my Discover card and they didn't get it to me until mid-October, a month and a half later. So I couldn't set up bill pay through Discover until I got the card, and I couldn't write them a check earlier because I also had to wait for the checks to arrive since the guys who broke into my car also started writing fraudulent checks on my checking account and therefore I have a new one of those as well.
Apparently, the check I wrote at Sears almost a month ago was processed as paid, sent to the bank, according to my bank statement, the money was removed from my bank account and then the check was returned to Discover, leaving me with a past due notice, and 1) a $15 late fee, 2) $1.03 in finance charges (it was a small balance), and 3) a $2.06 returned check fee. Not a lot of money but truly annoying since they took until now to tell me of this, and the money has not been credited back into my bank account!
I am now off to talk to the bank in hopes that they can straighten out why the check was returned instead of being processed normally. Will it ever end?????
Update: After a few hours wasted on the phone, it looks as if the bank account is fine, they'll contact Discover to try and get the charges taken off, and hopefully they'll figure out why the check was returned in the first place soon.
Posted by dahl at October 26, 2004 3:37 PM
stuff like that happens to me all the time. and the most annoying part is how difficult they make it for you to fix it. it is like they want you to give up and just pay the errouneous charges. it makes me SOOO ANGRY. Like when I found out that Keyspan never came out here and read my meter, they just made up what they "guessed" was my bill. Which was of course way higher than it was supposed to be. SIGH. the good news was in the end I didn't have a Keyspan bill in over a year.
as a person who went through the HORROR THAT IS A PURSE THEFT five years ago now, i highly advise you to take care of all your shit.
because i didn't. there were only so many notarized police reports i could get for stores who accepted my checks after the account was closed before i lost my freakin' mind. and refused to do anymore. and to this day, it still haunts me. get it cleared up and keep really good records of everything.
That stuff really screws with your credit, too, so make sure Discover takes that late payment alert off.
I feel ya. Unlike you, though, I'm generally irresponsible with my bills, to my detriment. But now with this big raise, I'm hoping it'll all settle down soon. As soon as I pay off all those overdue bills and stuff. Ugh. My credit is horrible.
ugh, how utterly awful. glad it's getting fixed, though.