As for ‘just stop paying’, sure I have. Very easily and with no remorse or consideration when the product is very specifically purchased and paid for for a set period of time, like an insurance policy of any kind. I’m only paying for your service from date X to date Y, which is spelled out in the policy. You can pretty much assume that if I don’t make the payment for period Y to Z, then I’m no longer your customer.
Plus, I wonder if there were a car accident and they try to make a claim on the policy they are being billed for, I wonder if the company would pay or not?
They can’t have it both ways and I bet they wouldn’t pay out the claim if there were an accident, so they were still billing in secret for not even providing a modicum of a service in return.
I use Wells Fargo, and they don’t charge me for on-line bill pay - which is, as you say, allowing companies to withdraw money each month on my say-so. The electric company has either automatic deduction or paper - we go with paper, for the reasons mentioned. Credit card companies like to set the default payment to minimum, not full, sneaky bastards. Does anyone know if this is the default for automatic payment? Another reason not to do it if so.
Odd thing about Wells Fargo. We have or mortgage with them also, but never pay on-line since they have no on-line way of increasing the principal payment.
You might want to look at this again. Our mortgage is with WF, we get notices online, pay online (not automatic, at our trigger) and we overpay the principal each month.
Every auto policy that I’ve ever seen has an expiration date, and states that it renews if and only if the company sends a renewal notice and a bill, and if and only if the customer accepts renewal by paying the premium. I’ve never heard of a customer being liable for automatic renewal beyond the expiration of the policy. I’ve never heard of an insurance company even wanting such a thing, since it opens them up to paying claims for deadbeat customers.
Hell, I did this with a porn site once, and even they didn’t try to pull this on me. I generated one of those limited-use “shop safe” credit card numbers and used that for them; once the next month rolled around (yes, my account with the site was even set to auto-bill :p) and they couldn’t deduct, they closed the account right away without any prompting from me.
So if I were the OP, and the insurance company told me I couldn’t cancel my ex-wife’s policy because I wasn’t primary, but then come to me TWO YEARS LATER and just went and withdrew all of her back payments from my account, I would find that seriously unethical and unfair. I can’t cancel it but I have to pay for it? GTFO. How can that be legal?
This seems like a very good point, as well.
while this is undoubtedly true for a one-to-one relationship between an insurer and a policyholder, it may or may not hold true if you go through e-surance. you may be unwittingly entering into a separate agreement with them (i.e. they are more than just the insurers’ agent) for continued payment of premiums.
I always figured that if I missed a month’s payment my insurance carrier would drop me like a hot potato.
I have a feeling that is what your’s would have said if you had tried to make a claim in that period.
For car insurance?
Yes. Would not hesitate, I have changed insurers twice in the last three years, each time I made the change when the policy expired, and did not officially inform the insurance agency. As, ya know, it was for a fixed term.
Voyager, I believe that Wells Fargo has free online bill pay for certain levels of accounts or for employees. (Full disclosure: my brother-in-law works for Wells Fargo, and it’s because he’s an employee that his bill pay is free. And that’s why he uses it. Even he admits that if it wasn’t, he’d probably bank somewhere else. He’s also the first to admit that WF likes its fees.)
For the lowest levels of accounts (the “free checking” ones and such like), it was $4.95/month. Aha! And now that I look - good og I’m lazy - I see on their website that it’s free if you have an eligible checking account or keep a combined minimum account balance of $5,000. They say that most customers qualify for Free Bill Pay. However, if you don’t qualify, it’s free for two months, then $6.95/month thereafter.
I changed banks when they instituted the $4.95/month charge - US Bank doesn’t charge. And it also lets me overpay on my mortgage, too. I’m sure WF would let you do this; check the pages carefully.