Full Time RVer

For fulltimers and other RVers who spend a lot of time on the road, electronic bill paying may be neatest thing since sliced bread. Simply sit down at your computer, press a few buttons, and viola! Your bills are paid, no stamps, no post office, and no worrying about whether your bills will catch up with you, after all, you got them over the Internet.

But hold on. All this convenience can come with its own set of danger–if you don’t stay on top of the details.

This all came to our attention when we sat down to pay the cell phone bill the other day. Just before clicking the button to send of payment approval–and to have money taken out of the checking account, the family bill payer noticed a slight discrepancy: The bill was about $20 higher than normal. Had there been a flury of “out of country” long distance calls made during the month? After opening the “bill detail” pages, the plot thickened like tapioca on a hot stove.

There were no “long distance” charges. Nobody had exceeded the “allowed airtime” limits for the month. There weren’t excessive “text” messaging charges. Whoa! That was funny: In fact, there were no charges for text messages at all–and yet, there were a few text messages detailed out in the bill. That was a flag: We don’t send a lot of text messages, so we’d never signed up for a flat rate text messaging service, and yet, somehow, the company wasn’t billing us for those few messages we had sent.

A closer look at the bill revealed that somehow, somewhere, we were now paying $20 for flat rate text messaging. A quick call to the cell company customer service folks revealed that, according to their records, we had signed up for a text messaging plan. That’s when the bells rang. A month or so ago, someone who said they represented our cell phone service had called to try and talk us into signing up for such a plan. We declined, flatly and firmly. Yet, here it was.

The customer service folks were apologetic, said they’d take us off that plan right away, and credit our account for the charges. “But how is it,” we asked, “that we were signed up in the first place?” Customer service suggested perhaps we’d visited a company store recently and somehow signed up. “No, we haven’t been in one of your stores in over two years.” The “official line” was it must have been an accident. Our view? We were “slammed,” and had extra services added without our permission.

No matter how it happened, if we hadn’t spent an extra few minutes looking the bill over, who knows how long we would have gone down the road, paying for something we never requested. The moral of the story is clear: When you pay your bills–or even more so if you have “auto pay” services in place–check your bills closely. Mistakes happen. “Slamming” happens. Don’t let it dig into your bank account.

photo: *_Abhi_*on flickr.com

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