Irregular Payments

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Not exactly breaking any news to those of you following the personal finance blog world, but HSBC has out of the blue decided to lop off a quarter percent on their HSBC Direct savings accounts. Mind you, the email I just received from them didn’t mention that fact, just that their summer high-rate promotion had come to an end (hmmm, I don’t recall a notice that their high-rate promotion had begun), but that the rate is still .2% above the rate they were offering before the promotion.

Oh, and that they were now offering the incredible rate of 3.75% on a CD…

Which just reminded me that I want out of HSBC-land. I only log into the account once or twice a month, either to deposit my monthly non-monthly bills money (ala something like 1/12th of our property taxes or 1/6th of our car insurance payment) or, if when it becomes time to pay one of those irregular bills, to withdraw what was set aside. And each and every time, I’m annoyed by their login process. On two occasions now, I’ve had to waste my time calling them up and plead to let me back into my account after screwing up the login a few times in a row.

If I truly value my time, just one call to restore my account after a login foul up will easily kills a few years in extra interest beyond what I can get elsewhere. It’s just not worth it to trade that five bucks or so a year extra my irregular bill fund earns at HSBC with the simplicity that is ING Direct (where I keep my side business money partitioned away from our ‘regular’ money).

So I just opened another sub account at ING, and in a few days, I can remove one more bank from my Financial Institutions I Have Accounts With list.

Back in February, I received a panicked call from our local grocery store: my wife had a small — but definitely cringe-worthy — accident. Walking around her car to get our son out of his carseat, she found a patch of black ice on the sidewalk, went down hard, and caught the edge of the base of a light pole with a ridiculous amount of force. When all was said and done, I ended up spending an afternoon in the local emergency room distracting entertaining my son. Meanwhile my poor wife had all the fun that head and spine CT scans and 12 stitches to close up a gash in the ol’ noggin can be. Like I said, most definitely cringe-worthy!

When we initially arrived at the ER, the attending nurse asked what had happened, and more specifically, where it happened. When I told her the details, she let me know that she would be sending the bill to the business who should have been maintaining the sidewalk, that most likely their insurance would cover the bill. And if not, then they would send it on to ours.

In the end, she was physically fine — though you can bet she paid a little excessive attention to anywhere that may have been the slightest slick for the rest of the winter. The bill — which I wasn’t really thinking of at the time anyway — would be covered by someone’s insurance, eventually.

So everything was just fine and dandy, right?

Fast forward five months, and earlier this week my wife received a call from a debt collector claiming we owed a ridiculous amount to the company processing her CT scans. You see, the store’s insurance company and our insurance company are still battling it out to determine which one would be paying. The CT scanners were apparently tired of waiting, so decided to see if they could threaten us enough that we’d pay their incredibly inflated claim. My wife was having none of that.

Threaten to ruin our credit?

Go ahead, I don’t care — we’re not planning on borrowing anything anytime soon.

Threaten to sue us?

Go ahead. By the time this reaches the courts, it will have long since been settled.

How about you pay us now, and when whichever insurance company pays, we will send it to you?

Uh, you really don’t think I’m going to be doing that, do you?

Now this last one, when the wife mention it, this one intrigued me. I’m not altogether sure, but I’m believing something so blatantly a lie is probably criminal, though I’ll have to look into it to be sure.

Needless to say, the wife agreed to nothing, except that 1] the debt was not ours to pay, and 2] that Mr. Debt Collector should quit wasting his time contacting us, and that a letter to that effect would be en route to ensure exactly that.

Oh, and of course #3:

Debt Collectors are liars.

It’s amazing what a little venting can accomplish.

A day after I wrote of my problems getting ahold of anyone in my attempt to get a rebate from DirecTV actually paid, I cooled off a bit and tried using their standard customer service contact form. None of the comment topics they offered matched mine (’Angry Rebate Seeker’), but I picked one that was reasonably close and sent off my missive anyway. A rather pointless exchange occurred between myself and a few CSRs telling me essentially the same thing (”We’re sorry, but the volume of rebates is so large that the payment has been delayed blah blah blah“), but at least I got to vent a bit.

Nevertheless, less than a week after the last exchange, what appears in our PO box but a shiny new rebate check for $100. Coincidence? I doubt it. The whole rebate system is just shy of a bait-and-switch tactic, with retailers counting on us screwing up, or giving up, and pocketing the difference.

That said, threatening to contact the FTC when they don’t meet their own terms appears to get rebate offerers motivated - not only did I finally get my rebate, yesterday I received a stack of free pay-per-view vouchers. And the FTC still got my complaint…

You can bet I’m going to carefully read the terms are on those before I even think of using them!