spugbrap’s blog

I got an email from DirecTV recently, telling me that prices are going up. They linked to a PDF with new pricing info. It looks like the price of just about every subscription plan/feature they offer is going up by $2-5/month. It was not customized for me, though–it was very generic.

To find out how much my own rates were going to increase, I had to login to my account on directv.com. When I got there, though, I had a very hard time figuring out exactly what my current plan is, and how much I’m currently paying for it.

See, the problem is that I signed up with my bank to receive e-bills from most of my billers, including DirecTV. For some reason, because I usually like to view and pay all of my bills from one central location (my bank’s website), DirecTV will not allow me to view any of my bills–past or present–on directv.com.Here’s what I got when I tried to view a bill (to see which subcription package/rate plan I’ve been on for the past few years):

Our records show you are signed up to view your DIRECTV bill through your financial institution, or another bill paying web site, and not through directv.com. Because the DIRECTV online bill view service allows you to view your bill at only one web site, you are unable to view your bill at directv.com.


To view your bill here instead, you must first discontinue the online bill view you set up at your other bill paying website, by following the instructions they provide. Once de-enrolled from their bill view feature, it may take up to 30 days before you can view your bill statement at directv.com.


In the meantime, you still have access to all other directv.com account functions, including making an immediate, one-time check or credit card payment. Thank you.To ensure the privacy of your personal information, this message will no longer appear once you close the pop-up browser window.

I don’t understand the point of preventing me from viewing my bill from multiple locations. I encountered this same odd behavior with Verizon in the past. Does anybody know why they would do this? I could understand limiting users to having monthly e-bills sent to only one bank. But I think you should always be able to view your account information, including at least the most recent bill, on the company’s site, itself.

To make matters worse, it can take a month or two to get them to start sending e-bills to a bank, and then it can take a month to stop them from sending e-bills to that bank. That huge delay puzzles me, as well. Online customer account management and B2B communication should be instantaneous. 30 days is worse than snail mail! Couldn’t DirecTV print out my bill, send it to my bank via horseback mail carrier, and have someone at my bank type the bill into their system in less than 30 days? Ugh!

Anyways, my rate increase is about 5.5%. Oh well, not like I have much choice. It’s Comcast or DirecTV, here, and I’m happy with my DirecTV DVR that I got before their agreement with Tivo ended. I tried Comcast cable for a while, last year, but I couldn’t deal with the horrible Scientific Atlanta DVR that came with that.

**UPDATE BEFORE POSTING**Okay, I’ve been meaning to blog about this for several weeks, now. I logged into my account at directv.com, a few minutes ago, and I was able to see the name and price of my subscription plan right at the top of the main Account Details page, in a section called “Activity Since Last Bill.”

Click the above link to see the expanded Activity Since Last Bill section from my directv.com Account Details page.

I’m not sure if I just didn’t notice/find this link when I was looking for it, a few weeks ago, or if they’ve since made some changes to their website. I think I’m seeing a lot more DHTML/AJAX going on, so I’m thinking they made some UI improvements recently.

Unfortunately, the “View Bills” link still takes me to that page quoted above, where they tell me that I can’t view my bill on their site since I signed up to be able to receive e-bills on my bank’s site. Hmpf.

In the past, when my checking accounts have been overdrawn, it has been no laughing matter. I’ve been sad, angry, annoyed at myself, annoyed at my bank, etc. Earlier this week, though, I actually had an overdraft occur which made me laugh out loud!

First, a little context (impatient? skip to the funny scenario):

Lacey and I have been using USAA for our home, auto, and life insurance needs since we’ve been married (9 years now!). A few years ago, their banking division, USAA Federal Savings Bank (FSB), offered us a good deal to refinance our van loan, and we did that. We’ve been very happy with all of the USAA services that we’ve used, and have had countless frustrations with Bank of America (BoA), so in June of 2007, I opened checking and savings accounts with USAA FSB. Over the course of a month or two, I switched all my spending and bill payment over to that account. In September of 2007, I closed my BoA checking and savings accounts (the last straw was when BoA started charging me fees for not using my accounts!).

USAA FSB has been wonderful! I do all my deposits via USAA Deposit@Home, using my scanner and their web application. The deposits post to my account immediately. The savings account has a pretty high interest rate (way better than BoA’s), and even the checking account earns interest (way more than BoA’s *savings* account). I earn rewards points using my check card, and there are no minimum balance requirements for any of this.

Another great thing about USAA FSB is that they let you specify two overdraft accounts. I have my checking account set up to draw from my savings account, then from a credit card (issued by another bank, even), in case of non-sufficient funds (NSF). The best part is, there are no fees for the overdraft protection!

We had a charge which would have put the checking account in the negative by twelve cents, a couple months ago, and USAA just quietly grabbed that $0.12 from the savings account, and that was that! I say quietly, but I’m sure I received an email about it. BoA would have charged me $35 for the NSF, then $30 for using the overdraft protection (to transfer the $0.12 from savings).

Now, for the funny scenario that happened this week:

A couple weeks ago, an automatic recurring charge for $101.95 went on my credit card (a BoA/FIA Card Services card, formerly MBNA, Merrill Lynch branded). I scheduled a credit card payment of $101.95 through USAA Web BillPay, to be paid from my USAA checking account. However, my checking account balance was a bit too low, this week. There was not enough to cover that payment, and not quite enough to cover my Verizon phone bill payment.

Here’s a screenshot showing a few transactions (charges and credits) and my account balance:

So, check #354 brought my account balance down to $71.60. My Verizon bill payment was $71.90, so USAA transferred (without charging fees) $0.30 from my savings account, to cover that charge. Remember, BoA would have already charged me $65 at this point.

Now, there was a $0.00 balance and my credit card bill payment for $101.95 needed to go through. My savings account only had a couple dollars in it, so USAA didn’t bother with that. BoA would have transferred the remaining balance from savings, even though it didn’t cover the overdraft, and would have charged me for it. Instead, they transferred (without charging fees) $200 from my secondary overdraft protection account, which happened to be the same credit card! This covered the $101.95, and left the account with a non-zero balance. I assume this was just in case any additional charges come through before I got a chance to add funds to the account.

Summary:

So, the end result is that my checking account transferred funds from my credit card for overdraft protection, to cover the bill payment I was making to that credit card. Later that night, my paycheck direct deposited to the account, so all was well. (Well, actually, the credit card charged me a $6 fee for some reason (they called it “BANK TRANSACTION FEE”). No surprises there, though. BoA finds ways to charge fees for anything they can think of! But $6 was a lot easier to handle than BoA checking account overdraft and NSF fees). I went ahead and made a $206 payment to my credit card, and had a good laugh!

I’m happy with USAA Federal Savings Bank, and highly recommend it for anyone that is eligible. (That’s the only downside of USAA FSB. You have to be eligible for USAA membership to open accounts there. Check membership eligibility requirements here.).

A friend of mine sent me a link to this story on ofuzi.com today, but I couldn’t get to the site. He was nice enough to copy/paste the text so I could read it, though. Here it is, reposted so it can be enjoyed by others.

I never quite figured out why the sexual urge of men and women differ so much. And I never have figured out the whole Venus and Mars thing. I have never figured out why men think with their head and women with their heart.

FOR EXAMPLE: One evening last week, my girlfriend and I were getting into bed.

Well, the passion starts to heat up, and she eventually says “I don’t feel like it, I just want you to hold me.”

I said “WHAT??!! What was that?!”

So she says the words that every boyfriend on the planet dreads to hear… “You’re just not in touch with my emotional needs as a woman enough for me to satisfy your physical needs as a man.” She responded to my puzzled look by saying, “Can’t you just love me for who I am and not what I do for you in the bedroom?”

Realizing that nothing was going to happen that night, I went to sleep.

The very next day I opted to take the day off of work to spend time with her. We went out to a nice lunch and then went shopping at a big, big unnamed department store. I walked around with her while she tried on
several different very expensive outfits. She couldn’t decide which one to take so I told her we’d just buy them all. She wanted new shoes to compliment her new clothes, so I said lets get a pair for each outfit. We went onto the jewelry department where she picked out a pair of diamond earrings. Let me tell you…she was so excited. She must have thought I was one wave short of a shipwreck. I started to think she was testing me because
she asked for a tennis bracelet when she doesn’t even know how to play tennis. I think I threw her for a loop when I said, “That’s fine, honey.” She was almost nearing sexual satisfaction from all of the excitement.
Smiling with excited anticipation she finally said, “I think this is all dear, let’s go to the cashier.”

I could hardly contain myself when I blurted out, “No honey, I don’t feel like it.”

Her face just went completely blank as her jaw dropped with a baffled WHAT?”

I then said “honey! I just want you to HOLD this stuff for a while. You’re just not in touch with my financial needs as a man enough for me to satisfy your shopping needs as a woman.” And just when she had this look like she was going to kill me, I added, “Why can’t you just love me for who I am and not for the things I buy you?”

Apparently I’m not having sex tonight either.

DISCLAIMER: I hope I have made it clear that I did not write this, and am merely reposting/mirroring it, not plagiarizing it. Before posting this, I searched around a bit, hoping to find a cached copy/archive of it somewhere (tried google, yahoo, live, ask, duggmirror, duggback, coral, wayback, dotcache), but had no luck with that. It is linked to on digg, but the content, itself, is not included there. The original URL, again, is http://www.ofuzi.com/2007/05/28/no-sex-tonight/

From the FIA Card Services (aka Evil Spawn of the Bank of America+Fleet and Bank of America+MBNA mergers) Privacy Policy (emphasis added by me):

This notice describes the privacy practices of FIA Card Services for consumer financial products and services governed by the laws of the United States of America and applies to open, closed and inactive accounts with FIA Card Services.

For some reason, this concerns me a little bit.

I have two open accounts with them right now, and am going to go ahead and opt out of their information sharing options for both accounts. But it’s not people like me that I’m concerned about.

I’m concerned about people who may have ever had an account with Bank of America, MBNA, or any of the other credit card companies that they have collectively gobbled up over the years. People who may have canceled their cards long ago, cut them up, and forgotten all about them. People who may have even thrown away all of their bills/terms/etc., because it’s been so long.

According to the paragraph quoted above, FIA Card Services may share their information with other companies, even if their accounts are closed! Maybe I’m just naïve, but I never would have imagined that after I closed a credit card account, and stopped doing business with a company, they might still share my personal data with arbitrary third parties.

I’ll bet they don’t still mail annual Privacy Policy notices to everyone who has closed accounts. But, all of this may be a moot point. The wording is ambiguous enough that even though they *might* do something with that data, they probably don’t, and I have no positive proof that they actually do engage in this unethical practice. So, they get the benefit of the doubt, for now. But it’s still creepy, and they’re still evil for other reasons.

About 3 years ago, I got a new credit card called the Merrill Lynch Platinum Plus Visa. The card came with a nice, big credit limit, and had a fixed interest rate of 5.9% for purchases, balance transfers, and even cash advances. I’d never seen a rate so low for cash advances. I did not plan to do any cash advances, but it was still nice to know that I could, without suffering a typical 17-27% cash advance interest rate.

Anyways, this card happened to be managed by MBNA. I used the card for all my credit purchases, and it was my favorite card for a while. Then, in February of 2006, there was notice in with my statement, which said that they were changing my terms, due to a “change in [their] business practices”. These changes included making the interest rate for everything variable, which came out to 8.9% at that time. I was carrying a balance of over $13,000 on it at that time, so I was not looking forward to this rate increase.

In fact, I was so pissed off about it that I did what it said in the small print on the notice: I sent them a written letter, refusing the new terms. This meant that I could keep the existing interest rate, until I paid off the balance, but if I made any purchases on the card, it would automatically constitute acceptance of the new terms. So, I went through and switched everything that was linked to that card (SmartTag toll transponder, automatic monthly payment for Hwar Do lessons, and a few other recurring payments) to a different card.

Well, two weeks later, I received a notice from MBNA talking about how their merger with Bank of America had completed in January, after having been given the green light by the FTC in December. So, I’m pretty sure this merger is the change in business practices they were talking about. They sure didn’t waste any time making unfavorable changes to their terms!

So, my MBNA card was to be come a BoA card, slowly over the course of the year — the same way my Fleet card became a BoA card the previous year. We put the cards away and did not use them for 3 months straight. They still raised my limit a couple times during those months, and kept sending me promos/convenience checks, in the hopes that I’d suddenly have a need for thousands of dollars and that the promo checks (with 5.9% rate — same as the fixed rate my whole account had since opening it) would make me forget about the fact that I’d have to accept all their terms if I use them.

Anyways, I thought I’d changed all my recurring payments to use a different card, but apparently I missed one. :( The University of Phoenix billed me for a $70 “resource fee”. This is a fee that you have to pay for every class you take, and if you don’t pay it manually by a certain date, they auto-charge it. You’re supposed to pay it by the date the class starts, but I’ve always (for about 3 years before) paid it after the class ended, along with my tuition payment. They’ve never auto-billed me for it so early. Yes, technically they did what their rules say that they do, but it really irked me that they’d never done that to me before, and had to chose this particular time to start.

I tried and tried to get ahold of anyone in the finance/billing department at UOP, but could not reach anybody. I left voicemails for several people, and sent them emails as well, but nobody called me back or replied to the email. Actually, one person did call me back, about 3 weeks later.

So, I automatically accepted BoA’s new terms. I eventually accepted that at least 8.9% was still better than the rates on any of my other cards, which had both suffered from merger-induced terms changing (the previously mentioned fleet card, and a chase card). Thankfully, the rate has not gone up any more since that one time, while my other cards have continued getting worse.

I think it’s time to shop around and find a new card, though, from a bank other than Bank of America or Chase, so I can just cancel both of my damn BoA cards. I’ll probably switch my checking and savings accounts to another bank while I’m at it, since BoA has just done one thing after another to make my existing credit cards suck.