September, 2007. Then wife buys insurance from Esurance after I find out we were driving uninsured for 4 months
November, 2007. The ex leaves for Virginia, leaving me the house and all the crap.
January, 2008. I moved into a house by myself. I call Esurance wanting to drop her from the policy. I am told I can’t because she is the primary on the insurance. I can remove my vehicle from her policy and start my own. I pay for this with an automatic withdrawal from my new checking account. Her policy has an automatic withdrawal from a different bank. I figure when Esurance cannot withdraw a payment on the now closed account, they will cancel her policy.
July, 2008. I cancel my Esurance policy, they want to double my rates because of an accident I was involved in 4 years earlier. An accident in which I was not at fault. I move to Geico and save over $140 a month.
February, 2010. Esurance withdrawls over $4500 from my checking account for my ex-wife’s policy. They claim it is for the past amount due from what I thought was the long cancelled policy. I file a claim for unauthorized withdrawal with my credit union. They come back and claim because the withdrawal was for a long over due account, they can only get back 3 months worth of payments, $397. Esurance claims what they did was legal. This despite the fact my ex-wifes car was sold in October of 2008 and I traded in my pickup April of last year. Esurance claims they sent notification to my ex’s email, an email address she hasn’t used since November of 2007.
At this point I am waiting for my state’s Attorney General’s office to see if they can do something. The state Insurance Commisioner’s office only deals with specific policy issues, not payment issues.
I am now preparing to sue them if I have too. If you use Esurance, beware. They may come back and bite you in the ass long after you leave them.
Ah, I see that now. I think there were back-to-back “theys” that switched antecedents (is that the right word? I probably haven’t thought about the word for “the noun to which a pronoun refers” since high school English class).
If I’m understanding correctly, they never had your new checking information when:
You were married to the ex; and
You were involved in paying for the insurance on the ex’s car.
So at what point did you authorize them to withdraw anything for the ex’s vehicle?
I agree, it sounds super-shady. They may have a real claim against your ex, if she never bothered to cancel insurance on that car, but I really don’t think they can hold you liable for her insurance policy, if you explicitly canceled your policy with them.
I’m confused. If I don’t pay my insurance within a grace period, they assume that I don’t want to continue it. Hell, in the past when I changed car insurance, I don’t think I ever actually had to notify someone that I was cancelling it, I just stopped paying it and started paying the new one. How the hell would it be legal to come after you for years of back dated insurance??? Especially for an ex-wife?
Hell, I’d have been on the phone with the AG office the very day I heard of that one.
I always assumed this also, until the insurance company my brother had turned him over to a collection agency. Since he had been living with us they keep calling me every few days. I have explained to them repeatedly that he won’t be paying it as he has been dead for 2 1/2 years now and does not drive any longer.
My experience with insurance companies is that they are willing to be amoral and as dishonest as the law allows, and maybe beyond, if they think they can get away with it.
I had a policy on a car that was in an accident. The car was totaled, I got a check from the insurance company, and they arranged for my vehicle to be towed and then disposed of.
They continued to withdraw monthly insurance premiums from my bank account for over a year after the car ceased to exist. When I realized this and called them, they said that the two departments (billing and . . . something else) didn’t share the same database or something like that, and it was my responsibility to have called them to tell them that the car they took and got rid of wasn’t mine anymore.
I’m not trying to be snarky, here – I am honestly puzzled. How do you not notice a years’ worth of payments floating out of your account, month after month?
No . . . well, I didn’t. I do now. I had a few bad years where I was really anxious about opening mail and answering the telephone, going through depression, and unemployment, etc etc etc. At that time I would just have a basic idea of what money I thought I had in my account (which usually wasn’t much).
That, of course, is not the insurance company’s fault, and one of the things I kick myself for is not catching it sooner.
Indeed. One of the poorest pieces of financial advice is to go ahead and allow people to deduct money automatically from your accounts, even if it saves you money. I don’t even let my broker take money from my accounts directly.
Another piece of bad advice is to “go paperless!” like the utility bills, credit card statements, etc. keep begging you to do. All it takes is one spam filter set too tight and forgetting what week of the month it is and BAM - late payment.
I’m with you on both. I do all paper transactions, and while it’s a minor pain to do that (I often drop by personally) it’s saved me a bunch of heartache. No worrying about who has access to my accounts. No online security risks ( I rarely buy online, either, though mostly because I don’t buy much anyhow).
You can have your cake and it eat too. In order to keep total control over your account and have permanent records, you can still go paperless - just use on-line banking. For me, it was a godsend. An amazing (free) thing.
Why the fuck would you figure that? You thought the company would go “Hey, we can’t get their money. We should probably assume that they want to cancel the policy, even though they never said anything to us to even hint at such a desire”?
Is that how you normally cancel services? Just stop paying them?
Maybe. Or maybe not - Wells Fargo charges for on-line bill pay, though the banking part (checking balances and what not) may still be free. (WF loves their fees, yes they does.) US Bank still has free online bill pay, so that’s what I use. The only automatic payment I have set up is to my mortgage, and that’s set up through US Bank, not the mortgage company (meaning I set it up and authorized it, and I control whether and when it’s taken from my account).
Online banking is nice, if you set it up through your bank as strictly a push-type thing - US Bank withdraws money from my account and sends it to various companies only when I tell it to, and then only in the amounts I specify. Money is never taken from my account by others at their whim.
I donno, imagine you’re a business, and someone stops sending you thier monthly check. Exactly how long would you go on billing them before you decided to stop providing your services? It’s trickier with insurance because most people don’t do anything with it until there is something wrong, but you better beleive after a while most of them figure it out and cancel your account.