Frugal Babe

I was looking at our business credit card statements today, to make sure that everything was in order after our fraud incident last month.  They had cancelled my husband’s card and issued a new one, which was done as soon as we reported the problem.  We paid all the legit charges on the card, and that’s reflected on the new card statement.  The new statement also shows a reversal of the $3600 charge that someone made on the card, so all is well as far as the balance goes.  But then I noticed that our rewards points balance was negative 3200.  Hmmm.  It had been 10,081 last month, and I had cashed in 10,000 points to get $100 in gas cards.  So we should have been left with 81 points, plus what we earned this month. 

So I called them today, and after spending about 15 minutes on the phone talking with two very helpful reps, we figured out the problem.  Balance transfers don’t accumulate rewards points (only purchases do that).  So when the fraudulent balance transfer went through, it didn’t affect our rewards points at all.  But when the bank reversed the charges, it showed up on our statement as a credit, and the rewards system saw that as a return.  It basically treated it as if we had bought something for $3600 and then sent it back.  So the system subtracted 3600 points from our total.  Hence the negative points currently showing on our statement. 

The second person I talked to said that it was a mistake, and that since the balance transfer hadn’t increased our points balance, a reversal of the transfer should not have decreased our rewards balance either.  She submitted an order to get it fixed, and said I would be notified within 30 days of the outcome of all this, and hopefully we’ll see the rewards points fixed on our next statement.  We only spend about $500/month on our business card, so it would have taken half of 2008 to just get back to zero if I hadn’t noticed the problem.  Now we can get back on track towards earning another $50 gas card much sooner than we would have if I hadn’t noticed the error.  Another reminder to double check financial statements carefully!

An update on my attempts to better secure our credit card:  I called our bank yesterday and got them to make a note in our file saying that balance transfers cannot be made from our credit cards to any bank account, regardless of who is asking for it.  We would never do this, but a thief would (and did, in the case of our business credit card last week).  So if someone calls the bank and claims to be one of us, asking for a balance transfer, it won’t be done.  The only thing that can be done with those cards now is purchases.  I know that there’s still a possibility of fraudulent charges, but we’ve lowered the overall risk by having the block on balance transfers.  I feel warm and fuzzy. 

Money, Matter, and More Musings has written a great pollwith 20 questions everyone should ask themselves regarding personal finance.  I feel like I’m pretty much on top of our finances, but I was not able to answer yes to every question.  There were five questions that made me realize that I still have work to do:

Do I have a backup of all important financial documents?  Not really.  And everything I have is in a cheap metal filing cabinet beside my desk.  I think that we should probably get a good quality fire proof safe and put a lot of stuff in that instead.  The documents concerning our mortgage, our life insurance certificates, copies of our parents’ wills, our credit card and financial account information.  I’m putting this on the to do list.

Have I gone over our credit reports in the last three months?  Nope – it’s been more like 9 months.  Oops. 

Have I seen my credit score in the last three months?  Not even close.  The last time we looked at our actual credit scores was in the fall of 2002 when we were buying our house.  I’m not too concerned with this however, since we have no plans to take out a loan, and I think that as long as our credit reports are good, the score must follow, right?  Maybe I’m being complacent about this… but I don’t want to pay to get our credit scores.

Do we have at least three months worth of expenses in an emergency fund?  Not yet.  We’re putting $100/month into our ING account, and we have just over $1000 in there right now.  We’re also saving in our HSA to have medical emergencies covered.  But realistically we need at least $9000 in savings to have three months worth of expenses in reserve.  That will take a while at $100/month, but we’re plugging away at it. 

Does my spouse know all the details of our financial info if something were to happen to me?  Sort of.  He’s aware of what expenses we have and what accounts we have (mortgage, Ameritrade, HSA, ING, etc) but I’m pretty sure he doesn’t know all the nitty gritty.  He’d have to sift through that little metal filing cabinet to find everything, and some of it is pretty cryptic.  I enjoy handling the money, and he lets me do it.  When I was working in a big corporation 60+ hrs/week and my husband was just starting his self-employment journey (about 6 years ago) he handled all the money and bills.  But it’s more complicated now – there are more assets (back then we had a checking account and our 401ks and that was about it).  So I think that we should sit down for a meeting about the details.  Maybe we could get a safe and then work together to fill it, making sure that each of us knows exactly what’s going in. 

MMM’s postwas an eye-opener.  If you haven’t taken the quiz yet, you should head over there and see what areas you need to work on – and if you can answer yes to every question, congratulations!!!

Earlier this summer, my husband had a dermatology procedure done in a local office.  We had picked that office because they offered the best price – we knew nothing about them beforehand. 

Over the last few months, we’ve gone back and forth with them about the bill.  Basically, they quoted about $300 plus pathology over the phone when my husband explained what he needed.  We’ve long since paid the pathology bill ($85), but the bill for the whole procedure is still unresolved.  The billing person that we worked with was great – but she’s in a different office and is just contracted for the billing.  Her hands were pretty much tied, although she did manage to wrangle a small discount for us.  When we actually talked with the office manager of the dermatology practice, I was horrified by the fact that anyone like this can get a job that involves dealing with the public.  She was rude and condescending, and the idea of apologizing never even occured to her.  Both my husband and I talked with her, and were equally shocked by her behavior.  She actually hung up on my husband when he was trying to explain our position – I was in the room listening, and heard him talking in a calm voice and being continually cut off by her interrupting him. 

Both my husband and I are pretty easy-going people.  We are not quick to anger, we don’t send restaurant meals back if they’re not exactly what we ordered, we don’t get angry with airline ticket agents if our flight is cancelled or delayed.  We’ve both been in jobs that require a high level of customer service skills for almost 10 years; we’re very careful to treat others the way we would like to be treated, and tend to give people the benefit of the doubt.  But this woman was horrid. 

We basically came to the conclusion that the person who quoted $300 over the phone was pulling the number out of the air.  There is no way in the world she was basing her estimate on any of the actual billing codes that the doctor uses.  And yet before we had the procedure done, the only way we could get prices was to call around and trust the office staff to give us numbers that were at least loosely based on real billing codes.  We feel cheated with this whole thing.  We would never have had the procedure done if we had gotten an estimate even close to what they charged us, and yet after it’s done, we’re stuck with the bill, like it or not. 

We filed a complaint with the Better Business Bureau a couple weeks ago, and the BBB has told us that they’ve forwarded the complaint on to the doctor’s office.  Our insurance agency is a member of the BBB (and we’ve never had a complaint in 5 years of business), so we’re familiar with the procedure.  If the doctor’s office does not respond to the notice from the BBB, they end up with an “unresolved complaint” notation on their file.  So far they have not responded, and I’m not really surprised.  Throughout this entire mess, they’ve made it clear that their only priority is making money – once that’s done, they have no need for basic civility, ethical business practices, or customer service.  The sad part is that since they’re on the network for several big insurance companies, they know that they will still get business from people who just find them on a provider directory.

I talked with the billing lady about installment payments, and she said that it would be fine to make payments – she even told me that a lot of people only pay $50/month.  There is no interest charged on outstanding bills as long as a payment is made each month.  We’ve paid $200 so far, and I intend to pay $100/month until it’s paid off.  There is no way that I’m cleaning out our HSA right now to pay these aholes.

The funny thing is that we have the money in the HSA to pay the whole bill.  Even after all this time and as badly as they’ve behaved for the last 2 months, if they were to call us today and apologize for their ridiculous quoting method (ie, pulling numbers out of the air) and the way that they’ve treated our very ligitimate concerns, we would pay the whole bill tomorrow.  When we submitted our complaint with the BBB, we decided that if they made any effort at all to compromise with us and offer a genuine apology, we would pay the bill in full.  But since they have ignored us and ignored the BBB, they will be floating a 0% loan to us for over a year.  They earned their own bad karma.