Posted on 09/19/2008 11:21:26 AM PDT by buccaneer81
Some stuck without power powerless to fight bank fees Friday, September 19, 2008 By Margaret Harding THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH
When his power returned without Internet service Monday, Tom Perry had a bit of a financial freakout.
"It was kind of a panic-stricken moment there: 'Oh, no, what am I going to do?' " said Perry, whose credit-card and mortgage payment were both due that day.
Perry, like many others, pays his bills online. Online banking and bill payment are pushed as the easiest and most efficient ways to handle such transactions, but a power outage such as the one central Ohio is experiencing can leave people scrambling.
Perry was able to pay both bills over the phone, but not without a struggle. His mortgage company told him he would be charged $17 for using his phone to pay.
He avoided the fee by having his bank enter the payment, but he said he thinks companies should show a little compassion at a time like this.
"It's in their best interest to push their customers into this online payment because it cuts the cost of their collections dramatically, but things happen, and it's kind of hard when they penalized somebody when their choice of payment is unavailable," Perry said.
Huntington Bancshares didn't notice a drop in online-banking traffic this week or a spike in calls, spokeswoman Jeri Grier said. The company also has no special programs in place to accommodate customers who couldn't access their account because of a power failure, she said.
Likewise, National City didn't experience a decrease in traffic because of power failures, spokeswoman Kelly Wagner Amen said. She said the bank would handle such issues with customers on a case-by-case basis, but there would be no blanket power-outage grace period.
Key Bank spokesman Dan Davis said he didn't think there was a drop in online bank traffic, either. Instead, the bank is receiving questions on a different topic: the week's financial meltdown.
"We have been getting some calls from folks with all this turmoil going on with Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch just looking for some reassurance and trying to find out what's happening in the marketplace," Davis said.
Future Finances clients have called the wealth-management firm mainly to express annoyance that they don't have Internet access to track their investments, co-owner Brad Huffman said. One customer wanted to be kept up-to-date on the financial news he was missing during the outage.
Given the week's events, being in the dark might have been a blessing, Huffman said.
"For some people, it's probably been good because it's minimized the panic," he said.
Regardless of what's happening in the stock market, some residents were on a panicked hunt for Internet access to make sure that bills are paid and paychecks deposited.
Ohio State graduate student David Fooce said he sat in a Staples parking lot to check his bank account using a Wi-Fi hot spot. He's also been making visits to the Panera Bread on High Street to do the same.
"That was one of the things I had to do, come here and make sure I had the funds to buy a flashlight or some candles," Fooce said.
Frank Safranek of Clintonville has been making daily visits to the Whetstone Library to do "everything" online.
"I'm doing an awful lot of work here," Safranek said. "It's killing me."
Safranek said he runs out of the library to make business calls, then runs back in to check something online.
He's also wary of paying his bills online at the library, but he doesn't have a lot of other options, given that the banks around him are closed.
"I don't feel real secure doing it here because it's not a secure network like it is at home," he said.
mharding@dispatch.com
It must have sucked for you guys. Hope it gets better soon.
BTW, it was totally unexpected, here. Forecast was for warm and windy, occasional gusts 40-50 mph. What we got was clear, sunny skies with sustained winds 50-60 and gusts to 85 for almost ten hours. And 90 degrees to boot! It was amazing.
Good luck to you guys.
I don’t disagree, but I was responding to the “pay in person” comment.
Dish and Direct TV generally call Time Warner when they need to find something.
You don’t live in rural Virginia, do you?
That’s how we do things here, too.
We are very happy with Dish. You will need exposure to the southern sky. Find a 'local' outfit to do the installation, though. The Dish guys suck.
I pay all my bills online. The day the bill arrives, I go into my account and schedule the payment for the day it’s due. That way, I never miss a payment, they’re always on time, and I don’t have to worry about it getting lost in the mail, or the billing company saying they didn’t receive a check. I love online paying. (p.s. we have a generator and stored gas to operate our computer/frig/freezer, should we have a power outage, but if the internet provider/cable was out I’d be glad I had already scheduled the payment.)
Don't feed your power back into the grid.
Anytime I see the possibility that I may not be able to see the bill in time, I will enter earlier at least the minimum payment due and then adjust it later if I have the chance.
Almost all of my monthly bills are set up to automatically be paid every month. But, I have a checkbook for backup and I'd be surprised if even the most tech-savvy people out there don't have paper checks as a backup.
Rural Wisconsin. Country people react with common sense in disasters or otherwise. There’s no other choice, is there? When you are miles from anyone else and when you have learned the hard way that a lot of hired maintenence is too late, too expensive and not always done that well, you learn real quick to take care of things yourself and to do as good a job as possible the first time.
That said, the county crews do a good job. But they have a lot of territory to cover and roads need to be kept open. We inform them of things, but we don’t wait for them.
That's the rewiring I was talking about. Picking out the essential outlets and seting up a circuit in my house which I can cut off the outside world with a switch. The toughest one to handle is the furnace since there isn't a plug I could just pull and hook to a generator.
A lot of people didn't know that and were feeding electricity back into downed lines after the storm. The news reports on the radio were giving warnings not to hook your generator into the house circuit to keep that from happening.
We had comcast when we first moved back to Texas 5 years ago—cost us about $85 back then for a *single* receiver in our apartment—when we got our house in ‘04, we decided to try DirecTV, and even with 4 receivers and one special ‘ala carte’ channel subscription (BABY CHANNEL), it’s still $10 less than comcast! Overall we’ve had a very good experience with DirecTV, the only complaints I have is when we have a gullywasher we lose our satellite connection—and we don’t have local weather radar channel like we did with comcast. Other than that, no problems.
Yup, this is what I do with credit card/medical/misc. bills as well. With recurring household bills (mortgage, electric, gas, etc.) I have automatic payments on those. Very easy to schedule to pay the bills in advance this way.
Right after Hurricane Katrina, my bank bent over backwards to not charge any bank fees, especiallly for overdrafts that happened after the storm, realizing that people could not get to a bank to make deposits, and that there were many who had automatic drafts coming out of their accounts, and they also didn’t charge for ATM fees.
Can this nitwit not write a check and put it in the mail 2 or 3 days before it is due?
But we're making it just fine with the help of a generator and well stocked emergency supplies. We need to work on the cold shower thingy though. It's not fun.
Here is a link to a good online book about power being out because of an EMP: http://survivalmonkey.com/SF%20books/LightsOut!/LightsOut-Current.pdf
Hope our fellow FReepers are doing ok.
Another thing that would be a good investment for everyone is an inverter. I got one at Home Depot for $80 or so. An inverter is a device that hooks up to a car battery, and then gives you AC power. Not a huge amount, but about 900 watts (with a short burst to 1,400 watts). Enough to run the computer, monitor and cable modem. Just hook it up to your car, and leave your car running. You won't be able to run the fridge or an A/C, but it will run some things.
I got mine to run the sump pump or the pellet stove (which requires a small amount of electricity) if it is freezing outside.
If you don't have a generator, and you have a car, I'd recommend an inverter.
LOL! That was our worst hardship, too. Our water bill is going to be down this quarter.
I was being too harsh. It’s occurred to me that even though it sucks to be sweating it out in Texas with no power, it’s still better than what happens in the north when the furnaces go out in the winter.
I don’t know if I’m going to generator up or not. It still seems like a lot of money. In the GSOT though, and the way things are going in the world, probably not a bad idea.
I’m sort of interested in the idea of a propane generator. Actually I’d like one that I could run off my natural gas, and then if necessary switch to propane tanks. My gas has never gone out during this whole ordeal.
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