Earthlink doesn’t work that way. I do pay exactly as you say through my credit union and they charge me a fine. They want autopay and nothing else. They refuse to tell me why.
Or car title loans…My sister’s neighbor became a multimillionaire by doing that just outside military bases. This site sums it up for me…
The county where I live charges something like 5% to let you pay your property tax by credit card, so the fee can come to hundreds of dollars. I wonder if anybody does it.
I can pay all of my bills online for free, except for one - my water bill. They charge me $1.50 to pay it online. I send them my payment via snail mail instead. The postage is cheaper. However, I don’t have to send a check as payment. They will accept the bill with my debit card number written on it instead. Go figure.
I think that’s because the credit card company charges them to process the payment, and I bet people do charge their property taxes.
LOL…my broker did the same. They sent me mail which talked about the waste of getting materials through the mail…and that I can have them emailed to me instead.
I was all onboard until I reached the part which said ‘for only $6 a month!’
WTF?
You don’t have to snail mail me stuff and pay postage and you want to charge ME for that? If anything you should be giving ME $6 a month.
No thanks.
They are willing to do it for free now but I still refuse after their greedy grab.
Both the water and power companies here charge a fee to process online payments. I don’t know how much the water company currently charges, but the power company charges $4.75.
Did your mortgage get bought by BOA? I originally had Countrywide and paid online, and then they were bought by BOA. I paid the same way you do (just went online and paid with my non-BOA account at the end of the month) and never paid a fee.
But in my experience, when one company buys out another company, the new company will sometimes waive fees and such for the old company’s customers to keep from having all of their new customers drop them.
So if your mortgage is with BOA through not-your-choice and Philster actually went and bought a mortgage from BOA then he very well could have a different account than you, one which charges fees.
Too funny! When I first moved down here, I’d get these inserts in with my electric bill talking about saving time and money - pay online! The line I remember exactly was “Save a stamp - Pay online!” So I go to pay online and they had a 4.95 convenience fee! :smack:
No, my mortgage originated with BOA. I’m getting curious now why one of us would have to pay and the other doesn’t. (Geez, I hope I’m not jinxing myself.) The only thing I can think of is that I don’t wait until the first. If Philster doesn’t either then I’m stumped.
As to the original point of the thread, I believe it’s strictly about profit. When they first enticed us to use bank cards, ATM use was free. Using bank cards was supposedly a lot less expensive for the banks; less human resources. Same with processing checks. Now that virtually everyone uses cards they see it as a revenue source.
You have to a be a little careful with too large a brush in things like this.
I work in marketing…I am a numbers geek part of it but I am heavily involved with all parts of it some of which I am certain you have seen 
These things are not one monolithic entity. What probably happened is that researchers determined that people would love to pay on line and it would save the company money. They probably even tested a phrase that would be most effective ‘save a stamp - Pay online!’. Then some schmuck came along at the end and just added a huge element to it without consulting anyone and without retesting anything…‘Hey…lets charge $5!!!’
I have been involved in some of these. The worst I personally saw was Blockbustard and their ‘no late fees’ fiasco. The final result the BB rolled out was NOT what was it was designed to be.
:dubious:The worst I have ever seen is some small credit card companies where you are forced to pay a fee to pay your bill, they have no physical address or address to mail payments to online only.
My mother is elderly and still refuses to pay for an ISP or learn to use a computer, and its getting to the point she can’t even function in society. Her utilities and other businesses she deals with are constantly not sending her a bill(because I checked her balance online or paid online the month before even though I made sure to click keep sending paper statements) or suddenly close a local office or stop accepting payments by mail. They don’t care either, they act like you’re retarded when you say you can’t pay it online.
She ends up depending on me to do it for her, and my god since when did it become standard to pay $$$ to pay your bill?!
Oh, that wasn’t your fault? As a store manager (at the time), I hereby revoke all the curses I called down on your head. Er, sorry about that plague of locusts a decade ago.
I’ve been assuming that’s the driver behind this trend – they want (really REALLY want) to be able to automatically debit your account on a prearranged date. For some reason that seems to be the Holy Grail of Accounts Receivable. All the places I pay eventually seem to start charging for snail mail, online, or over-the-phone payments “but you can arrange for automatic debit for free!!!”
My offhand guess is that:
[ol]
[li]They are required (by law or consumer outrage) to give customers a grace period, the traditional “it’s due on the first but late fees kick in on the 10th” kind of thing[/li]
[li]They’ve found most customers will wait until the end of said grace period (“I’m mailing it on the 8th, or calling it in on the 10th!”)[/li]
[li]Automatic debit lets them get the money on the original due date (“the 1st” in the example above) because they debit your account whether you’re ready or not, and they profit by having (and being able to invest/earn interest from) everyone’s money for the grace period (the difference between the 1st and the 10th in the example above.)[/li][/ol]
As I read it, the Verizon fee was to encourage people to allow “automatic withdrawal” payments. (No fee) Basically, “give us complete access to take whatever we think is right from your account, and in return we won’t charge you extra.” Yeah, right…
Same with the Toronto-Dominion Bank. (TD) I think what with mortgage, various savings plans, and chequing account, etc. they me send more mail than everone else combined. As a convenience, for no extra harge, I can get them to stop mailing me. When they can reduce fees to something reasonable, maybe I’ll consider it. Until then, pasive-aggressive is all I can do.
Typical credit-card service fee is about 1.5% to 3%; if a reliable entity like a town or city charges 5% extra, either they are being taken to the cleaners by the bank, or more likey they are tacking on their own extra “stupidity tax.”
I’m not sure whether this is already part of your Conspiracy Theory or can be shoehorned in, but also:
4. And people living paycheck-to-paycheck may not have the funds on the 1st, but because it’s set up Autopay, it will go through anyhow, you’ll get your money and they will have to pay overdraft fees to the bank. Win-win. (If you’re the credit card company and the bank, of course. Fuck you if you’re the consumer.)
Especially if it is free, just use your bank provided bill pay service to pay your bills rather than setting it up with the individual biller. For basic bill pay (as opposed to electronic bill presentment where your bank knows what you owe, can show you the bill from that person, and automatically time payments to due dates) there should never be any fee from the biller involved.
If the recipient won’t accept an electronic transfer to pay the account the bank cuts a physical paper check and mails it to the recipient just as if you had done it. You have to maintain the burden of making sure payments cover amounts due and due dates but there shouldn’t ever be any fees (beyond the general one your bank may charge for Bill Pay in general).
I was only tangently involved…but I was involved toward the beginning of the process. I was able to keep up with the horror unfolding because a colleague kept me informed.
Like I said…the worst and I been doing this 20 years 
BB was the perfect picture of a company that just ‘didn’t get it’.
Things like taxing authorities are explicitly permitted to have a credit card surcharge, to cover the fees they pay the clearinghouse. Otherwise they don’t get the full tax due. It’s a convenience thing; they don’t HAVE to offer that service. Whether it results in net higher cash in their pocket (i.e. the surcharge usually exceeds the credit card fees) or not, I don’t know. I suspect it’s pretty close to being a wash.
I can pay our car taxes online without any surcharge if I do direct debit from our checking account.
The other surcharges are as others have said, a “because they can” charge; I guess enough customers put up with it. Look at it this way: if you’re not sure your check will get there in time, it’s cheaper to pay a 12 dollar fee online than to pay the late charge / interest charges because the check got there 12 hours late (and some of the Big Banks have been rumored to “not receive payments on time” deliberately to increase their fees).
I pay my Chase credit card bill online every month and have never encountered a fee. However, let’s say I’m paying it online late on the day it’s due: for a fee, I can get it credited as on time (normally it needs to be set up a least the day before, I think, so if I’m paying it at 7 PM it’s considered late). I may have done that once, with either BofA or Chase.
BofA also never charges for online credit card payments; I don’t have a mortgage with them so I don’t know about a fee for that (but I believe it).
I too think they’re being VERY short-sighted in implementing such routine fees (the “gonna be late because it’s due TODAY” fee excepted because that’s a “you screwed up, fool” charge). People who can, will walk away. And it’s got to be cheaper to process the online payment than to handle a check, even with electronic processing of those and almost-immediate crediting to their accounts.
A lot (most?) stores now simply debit your check immediately and hand it back to you. I wonder if other business’, like those mentioned here, do the same? All parties, except the customer, benefit from this practice. I no longer write checks, but this would annoy me. It annoys me anyway to tell the truth.
Not-so-coincidentally, I just ordered my first box of checks in 7 years.
Wouldn’t it be kind of funny if these surcharges inadvertently end up saving the Post Office?