Posted on 02/27/2021 1:45:09 AM PST by Libloather
Mark Currie of Virginia had three checks snagged in postal delays in three months. In New Jersey, Lois Fitton says she was forced to pay interest on a credit card balance because the bill never arrived. Jim Rice says two insurance companies canceled policies for his property management business in Oklahoma after the payments got lost in the mail.
As the service crisis at the U.S. Postal Service drags into its eighth month, complaints are reaching a fever pitch. Consumers are inundating members of Congress with stories of late bills — and the late fees they’ve absorbed as a result. Small-business owners are waiting weeks, even months, for checks to arrive, creating cash-flow crunches and debates on whether to switch to costlier private shippers. Large-scale mailers, such as banks and utilities, are urging clients to switch to paperless communication, a shift that would further undercut the agency’s biggest revenue stream.
The growing outcry adds another dimension to the agency’s myriad crises: a clogged processing and transportation network, severe staffing shortages and $188.4 billion in liabilities. The prolonged performance declines have eroded the reputation of one of the few government agencies that boast generations of broad public support.
**SNIP**
DeJoy is pressing forward with a strategic plan to combat years of “financial stress, underinvestment, unachievable service standards and lack of operational precision,” even as congressional Democrats clamor for his removal. That plan - which will include higher prices and slower delivery standards, according to people briefed on the details - will come out in March, DeJoy told the House panel.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
I received a package last week from DC that was postmarked Dec. 15.
Within your email programs inbox folder you can create sub- folders ( aka sub-directories ). Each sub-folder can be given a unique name for each of the companies whose bills you want to keep track of or for any other regular correspondence that you want to separate from the incoming spam.
Most mail reader programs enable you to create “filter” rules that will place each incoming mail as it arrives into a folder that you specify automatically. The rules are executed in an order that you specify from first rule to last rule. The last rule in your list of rules can place “all other” email not flagged by a rule into a folder named for example “spam”.
After reviewing all the mail in your spam folder of course, you can then delete the whole spam folder with a single click of your mouse.
Your mail reader should also have a calendar anbd a task manager that will send you reminders to pay your bills on some “schedule” like the first of every month or every N days etc. You can even ask it to send repeated reminders in advance of the due date and continue to send reminders after the due date until you mark the task done ( ie you paid the bill )
You don’t have to set the whole set of rules up at once either. You can set it up as you go adding refinements until you develop a set of rules that suit your habits.
Modern electronic bill paying will enable you to print your own hard-copy of the bill if you desire or you can save a pdf copy of your receipt on your local hard-drive or a cloud hard-drive, or both. Most receipts have a Q-code or barcode as proof of payment.
I’ve had my bills set up for electronic payments for decades.
You can create a series of filters that place your mail in sub-folders for you convenience based upon the email senders address and or any number of other criteria that you select.
It is really quite easy to set up.
Use your favorite search engine to find instructions for your email reader on how to set it up. The instructions on line will walk you through it.
I set up rules to forward my email that I encrypt with PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) from my ISP to a third party email providers like google or yahoo etc just to have back up copies in-case my computer fails or is stolen, suffers from a fire or other natural disaster or (God forbid) another IRS audit.
You can slowly build up a pretty good, and reliable system for handling your correspondence with a small investment of time.
I can’t tell you how many times in recent months that checks I’ve mailed to vendors, some out of state and some local, many literally in the same town, that have not arrived. I get emails and phone calls from these vendors about past due invoices and tell them the check number, amount and when we mailed the payment. If it’s been more than 3 weeks, I put a stop payment on the check which costs us $39 a pop, void and reissue the check.
Many vendors are now asking for payment to be made ACH or via credit card. While we are a small manufacturing company we have a relatively high volume of invoices to pay, but our accounting software doesn’t support batch ACH payments and to individually initiate ACH payments though our bank would be incredibly cumbersome and time consuming. I am however currently looking into options.
We have a number of customers, larger companies who pay us for our invoices via ACH, but a good number who snail mail us checks, again many who are local and have had the same issue in reverse where we contact a customer about a past due invoice which they said they paid via check that hasn’t arrived weeks after they said it was mailed. We then have to ask them to reissue the check and presume they too have to put a stop payment on the original I at what I presume is a similar expense to them.
In my 30+ years in accounting I’ve never seen anything like this. While in the past I’ve might have had to put a stop payment, void and reissue a payment for a check presumed to be lost in the mail, it was something like once or twice a year if even that much. Now it is 4-5 times a month. I will say that banks have to be loving the increase in revenue from the all stop payment fees.
Being a small company I personally handed out W2’s and only had to mail to former employees but have had to re-print and re-mail several to former employees who said they never got theirs. This sometimes happens when people change address but in all these cases they haven’t changed addresses.
I also had an employee who was out on short term disability and receiving STD payments from our 3rd party vendor who is responsible for issuing a W2 for the STD payments. This employee came to me last week to tell me he didn’t receive his W2. I helped put him in touch with the insurer who confirmed they mailed him a W2 on Jan 31st, confirming his address on file was correct, and they told him they are having a high volume of calls from others who had not received theirs in the mail
FWIW I’ve been paying all my personal bills, which are few, electronically and some like my car insurance that is auto debited from my bank account and I get all bill notifications via email (no mailed bills) for well over 15 years and can’t remember the last time I wrote a check and mailed it or even mailed anything. 99.9% of all the mail I receive is junk mail that goes straight to the shredder and recycling bin. But I’ve been doing the electronic bill paying thing out of convenience and not because I couldn’t trust the USPS.
Who or what is at fault for this cluster F with the mail, I don’t know but I didn’t see this problem until Dejoy took over and “attempted” to cut costs by removing mail sorting machines and eliminating all OT and instructing that mail carriers should bring back undelivered mail at the end of their normal shift where it sat for days or weeks or went into a black hole.
“This is an operation whose primary source of revenue is now junk mail.”
Don’t forget weekend parcel delivery for Amazon & Ebay. I see mail trucks in my neighborhood delivering packages from sunup until well after dark, yet my mail doesn’t get delivered until 7PM. USPS has its priorities messed up.
Right now....I have two bills, one to Sears and the other to ANEX that have not yet been received yet. They both were sent over ten days ago. I was going to cancel the checks and pay them electronically.....but I was told to stand pat. Both Sears & AMEX better not ever charge me interest or penalties for late payment. I have never been late on any bill payment...period!!! The USPS should be turned over to a private company...immediately!!!!
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I’ve never written or even used a check for at almost a decade and a half, maybe 2 decades. Pissed me off my 80-plus land lady only wanted checks. So had to waste time and and money to buy checks. She wouldn’t take the checks you can have the bank can counter print, for some reason. Plus had to hand delivery the check a few towns over every month.
Out of the checks I bought, I used 2.
Just curious, has anyone else had problems with FedEx recently
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Yeah, I had a credit card expressed to me via Fedex to me after me old one was used illegally. Stuck in Memphis for a few days, then Anchorage a few days, then Guangzhou for 3 days, then Manila for 2 days now. Then to Cebu
5 shipping exceptions, keeps missing the next flight
Actually Amazon uses the US postal service for areas that are sparsely populated).
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Every time Amazon would deliver through USPS, the package would go missing. One week, 7 packages (stuff to big to fit in the common apartment mail slot, so left in the Mail Room in the lobby)
The management was propping open the door by having the door permanently locked open.
Filed police report after police report after police report. Apartment management got pissed and started warning me not to call the police.
Finally had to have stuff delivered to a Amazon locker, inconvenient as hell as it was an hour round-trip on the other side on Longmont, Colorado.
So yeah, USPS problem.
AND-—ALL those ‘automatic payments’ were frozen on Wednesday when the Federal Money Transfer system went down...ALL
Lot of FReepers complaining about USPS service on this thread. Here’s mine, Cliff Notes version:
Ordered small item online mid last Nov. $9 with shipping.
Didn’t arrive, went round and round by phone with USPS. Worthless.
Jan 13, received an email from USPS saying how sorry they were about losing my package.
Guess what showed up in my mailbox yesterday?
See tag.
Who PAYS bills in the mail (other than businesses) anymore. We are refinancing ONE YEAR later because it was only AFTER we closed and were making the first payment that we were told they don’t take mortgage payments ONLINE. either Mail - drive 60 miles to nearest branch - or make phone payment.
That said, we have the following that haven’t arrived yet:
Ins check for roof claim - mailed Feb 12 from 2nd county north of us.
Book mailed Feb 16 - USPS can’t tell us where it is in tracking - was originally to be delivered Feb 21.
book mailed ?? - gift subscription in county north of us already arrived.
In New Jersey, Lois Fitton says she was forced to pay interest on a credit card balance because the bill never arrived. Jim Rice says two insurance companies canceled policies for his property management business in Oklahoma after the payments got lost in the mail.
Sure, Lois.
After reading thru the comments, I have to say that I’m surprised how many Freepers don’t pay a bill unless it comes in the mail.
Don’t you know what is coming due?
I’m not talking about utilities or other things that vary by month...
The “customer is always right” no longer applies. especially with govt workers. If you don’t like it get somebody else to deliver your mail...peasant.
Plannedemic ping.
USPS in a death spiral. The sooner it is replaced the better.
I don’t count on it for anything.
We have a contract rural mail carrier. I told her to keep an eye out for another job. Of course USPS will not go away. It will be subsidized for as long as it takes.
We are the nation that applauds failure.
Well, it's in the Constitution. Sure, it needs complete rework, but it's there.
Vanguard and Franklin Templeton have services where they’ll deposit your 401K or IRA money directly into your checing account.
Also they’ll send you blank checks - that YOU can write out to people like your roofer - or anyone else. (Usually the smallest check you can write is for $250) There’s a good change the people who handle you 401K offer similar perks.
Being dependent on the mail is a little scary now a days.
No problem with USPS here. Amazon however lost 2 shipments during holiday season.
Well, yes. Like most things created by man, that can be changed too. Not necessarily wrong, just ineffective and mostly obsolete. Some people still need buggy whips but not nearly so many.
They won’t even consider to cut the service to every-other-day. That might be better than the not at all or unreliable and getting worse we have now.
#18 You would have been P.O.’d.... : )
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