I'm a big fan of teh internets. I'm an IT geek, and I feel much more comfortable dealing with the world online. Now, I'm not talking about those Second Life freaks--like anything, you can take a good thing too far. But I'd much rather get my bills, pay my bills, make changes to services (cell phone, for example), even buy a car, online.
But there's a downside to all this automation. We get complacent. Case in point: We have an automatic bill payment going to Sprint for our family-plan cell phone service. Back when we first consolidated our cell phone services onto one family plan (more than two years ago), I was doing a lot of independent consulting, so I was using my cell a lot. So we signed up for Sprint's family plan with 800 shared minutes. We set up an automatic bill pay of $90 to cover this.
Since then, usage patterns have changed dramatically, and we've also initiated our ambitious belt-tightening program. So when our contract was up, I bumped us down to the lowest family plan, 550 shared minutes. The bill went down to about $65/month.
A few months after all of this, I registered with Sprint to access our account online, and got a shock: our account balance was -$110.00. How could we owe $110 after we cut our service back? Had we missed a payment? Then I looked closer--we didn't owe $110, we had a credit of $110. We had never changed the automatic bill payment, and had been overpaying. DUH.
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