Bank of America credit card “feature” (be careful with autopay)

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Jags4186
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Bank of America credit card “feature” (be careful with autopay)

Post by Jags4186 »

So I woke up to a lovely scene this morning of a checking account with $150 in it. Like many of you I generally pay my credit card balance in full before due date. I signed up for the BOA Premium Rewards card for the $500 bonus, did the minimum spend and paid it off. Well today, even though there was $0 balance, the autopay went through for the statement balance for $2897. Now I have to fight with them for a refund as I don’t plan on using the card anymore and also have no money in my checking account.

I would avoid autopay if you have a habit of manually paying CCs with Bank of America.
GeoffD
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Re: Bank of America credit card “feature” (be careful with autopay)

Post by GeoffD »

So you’re saying you had auto-pay in full configured on the account but also went to their web portal and paid manually?

If that’s what happened, how many days separated the manual pay and the auto pay? If they were weeks apart, that’s a really lousy process by BOA. If they’re only a day or two apart, you probably paid manually after they’d already scheduled the auto pay.

I can’t imagine why it would be a fight to get BOA to refund the money promptly. My expectation would be a 2 minute phone call and the money is back in my account the next day.
28fe6
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Re: Bank of America credit card “feature” (be careful with autopay)

Post by 28fe6 »

I cancelled both my BOA cards because out of all my cards, they were the least convenient to pay. They actually wanted me to come into a branch and sign papers in order to set up auto pay from my online bank. Every step of the way, they tried to get me to set up a BOA checking account to "make it easy". Good riddance.
spectec
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Re: Bank of America credit card “feature” (be careful with autopay)

Post by spectec »

Personally, I use auto pay very sparingly, and only for recurring exact amounts ( such as home mortgage, insurance premiums, etc). No auto pay for credit cards, utilities, etc for me - just too many ways for the process to get tripped up. Such as when I got an erroneous $2,000 water bill a couple of years back. That took about 3 months to get sorted out, but at least they weren't holding my money the whole time. I prefer to "push" the money out to them electronically rather than having them "pull" the money out of my accounts.
Last edited by spectec on Tue Sep 18, 2018 6:28 am, edited 1 time in total.
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student
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Re: Bank of America credit card “feature” (be careful with autopay)

Post by student »

I agree that it will take a quick phone call to fix this. Even if you do not call, they will likely send you a check next month. I think it is due to some anti money laundering law.
student
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Re: Bank of America credit card “feature” (be careful with autopay)

Post by student »

spectec wrote: Tue Sep 18, 2018 6:27 am Personally, I use auto pay very sparingly, and only for recurring exact amounts ( such as home mortgage, insurance premiums, etc). No auto pay for credit cards, utilities, etc for me - just too many ways for the process to get tripped up. Such as when I got an erroneous $2,000 water bill a couple of years back. That took about 3 months to get sorted out, but at least they weren't holding my money the whole time. I prefer to "push" the money out to them electronically rather than having them "pull" the money out of my accounts.
I used the same principle for a long time but I finally gave up on utilities. One idea maybe the following. Open a credit card with low credit limit for utilities bills.
wangarific
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Re: Bank of America credit card “feature” (be careful with autopay)

Post by wangarific »

Stinks it still went through (but like others, it sounds like you paid after they scheduled it), but why did you manually pay when you had autopay set up already?
sbaywriter
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Re: Bank of America credit card “feature” (be careful with autopay)

Post by sbaywriter »

My Cap One card says the following:
We will debit your AutoPay Bank Account on your due date even if you make other payments. No debit will be made if you have a balance of $0 when the AutoPay Payment begins processing, typically 1-2 days before your due date.

So not just BoA.

So yeah, it requires some caution making manual payments close to due date because not always clear to me when the manual payment posts - the day I make it or when they actually get the $$ from bank account?
spectec
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Re: Bank of America credit card “feature” (be careful with autopay)

Post by spectec »

student wrote: Tue Sep 18, 2018 6:33 am
spectec wrote: Tue Sep 18, 2018 6:27 am Personally, I use auto pay very sparingly, and only for recurring exact amounts ( such as home mortgage, insurance premiums, etc). No auto pay for credit cards, utilities, etc for me - just too many ways for the process to get tripped up. Such as when I got an erroneous $2,000 water bill a couple of years back. That took about 3 months to get sorted out, but at least they weren't holding my money the whole time. I prefer to "push" the money out to them electronically rather than having them "pull" the money out of my accounts.
I used the same principle for a long time but I finally gave up on utilities. One idea maybe the following. Open a credit card with low credit limit for utilities bills.
I find it easier just to do two or three electronic payments a year for utilities. I just refill when the overpayment credit carryforward gets low enough that's unlikely to cover an average month.
Don't gamble; take all your savings and buy some good stock and hold it till it goes up, then sell it. If it don't go up, don't buy it. - Will Rogers
student
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Re: Bank of America credit card “feature” (be careful with autopay)

Post by student »

spectec wrote: Tue Sep 18, 2018 6:48 am
student wrote: Tue Sep 18, 2018 6:33 am
spectec wrote: Tue Sep 18, 2018 6:27 am Personally, I use auto pay very sparingly, and only for recurring exact amounts ( such as home mortgage, insurance premiums, etc). No auto pay for credit cards, utilities, etc for me - just too many ways for the process to get tripped up. Such as when I got an erroneous $2,000 water bill a couple of years back. That took about 3 months to get sorted out, but at least they weren't holding my money the whole time. I prefer to "push" the money out to them electronically rather than having them "pull" the money out of my accounts.
I used the same principle for a long time but I finally gave up on utilities. One idea maybe the following. Open a credit card with low credit limit for utilities bills.
I find it easier just to do two or three electronic payments a year for utilities. I just refill when the overpayment credit carryforward gets low enough that's unlikely to cover an average month.
Haha. I used to do that too.
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Jags4186
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Re: Bank of America credit card “feature” (be careful with autopay)

Post by Jags4186 »

Balance has been at $0 since August 27. I have autopay set up for all my cards because I’m anal and rotate between 8-10 cards a month depending on purchase. Sometimes I have $12 balances that I don’t want to miss a payment by accident.
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munemaker
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Re: Bank of America credit card “feature” (be careful with autopay)

Post by munemaker »

Jags4186 wrote: Tue Sep 18, 2018 6:51 am Balance has been at $0 since August 27. I have autopay set up for all my cards because I’m anal and rotate between 8-10 cards a month depending on purchase. Sometimes I have $12 balances that I don’t want to miss a payment by accident.
Why manually pay when you have autopay set up? Just put it on automatic pilot and forget it (still check your charges though).
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Watty
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Re: Bank of America credit card “feature” (be careful with autopay)

Post by Watty »

I don't use BOA but I have credit card autopay set up to just pay the minimum due so that if I zone out and miss a payment I will not get hit with the late fee. At most that might be something like $50 so if it accidentally got paid when it should not have it would not be a big deal.
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Tamarind
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Re: Bank of America credit card “feature” (be careful with autopay)

Post by Tamarind »

student wrote: Tue Sep 18, 2018 6:28 am I agree that it will take a quick phone call to fix this. Even if you do not call, they will likely send you a check next month. I think it is due to some anti money laundering law.
I agree that it's best to call.

I accidentally did this with a much smaller amount (~$120) as I was swapping to new cards because they stopped allowing me to redeem cash rewards to a non-BoA checking account. Forgot I hadn't turned off autopay. BoA left the credit balance on the card for 3 months, making no attempt to reach me or refund the double draft. It wasn't worth calling for that amount, so I just spent it back down until they collected a few cents in autopay.
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damjam
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Re: Bank of America credit card “feature” (be careful with autopay)

Post by damjam »

Pen Fed does what the OP experienced as well.
I never pre pay that card now.
As an aside, I had a different issue with a BofA CC and cancelled it several years ago.
wilshuer
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Re: Bank of America credit card “feature” (be careful with autopay)

Post by wilshuer »

If it makes you feel better, I paid my Penfed balance a year or so ago, and somehow put $11,495 instead of $1,495 through the app and saw it as soon as I hit confirm. That was a headache to work out.

Paying through their website has a limitation of $5000 per payment, but their app didn't at the time. I've since noticed the app seems to have an update with the same limitation.
UpperNwGuy
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Re: Bank of America credit card “feature” (be careful with autopay)

Post by UpperNwGuy »

There is another internet forum that focuses on credit cards and credit scores in which many of the members use autopay. Nearly every week someone posts about a problem involving an unintended credit card overpayment because the cardholder did a manual payment even though they had set up autopay. Seems pretty obvious to me that a person should do one or the other, but not both.

As for me, I hate autopay and use it only for Medicare, iCloud, and my storage unit. Never on credit cards.
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Re: Bank of America credit card “feature” (be careful with autopay)

Post by bertilak »

wangarific wrote: Tue Sep 18, 2018 6:33 am ... but why did you manually pay when you had autopay set up already?
I use autopay as a fail-safe mechanism. I pay my credit card balance manually several times a month (to keep the credit bureaus happy with a low balance) but have autopay enabled just in case I mess up.
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Re: Bank of America credit card “feature” (be careful with autopay)

Post by UpperNwGuy »

bertilak wrote: Tue Sep 18, 2018 7:50 am
wangarific wrote: Tue Sep 18, 2018 6:33 am ... but why did you manually pay when you had autopay set up already?
I use autopay as a fail-safe mechanism. I pay my credit card balance manually several times a month but have autopay enabled just in case I mess up.
But why?
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Re: Bank of America credit card “feature” (be careful with autopay)

Post by bertilak »

UpperNwGuy wrote: Tue Sep 18, 2018 7:57 am But why?
Better answer down-thread. I at first misunderstood the question.
Last edited by bertilak on Tue Sep 18, 2018 10:27 am, edited 2 times in total.
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jfn111
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Re: Bank of America credit card “feature” (be careful with autopay)

Post by jfn111 »

I also have Auto-pay setup for the minimum balance. We generally pay our credit cards weekly but if were traveling it's nice to have a backup in place.
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Re: Bank of America credit card “feature” (be careful with autopay)

Post by bob60014 »

We use Chase autopay for some bills. If we want to manually pay early or pay a different amount, they give us the option of doing so just for the upcoming payment or for the entire series of payments. It's hard to mess up. BOA doesnt have something similar?
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Re: Bank of America credit card “feature” (be careful with autopay)

Post by JamesSFO »

I've been burned by PenFed for this, I was switching primary banks so I paid my balance in full but didn't think to switch auto pay (yet) and it went from the old account and over-drew the account. USAA was nicer about refunding the fee then PenFed, I still kept them, but I think it is a sh*t customer experience.
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Re: Bank of America credit card “feature” (be careful with autopay)

Post by feehater »

Does BOA even have a standard "pay the full amount of last month's bill" autopay setting? I looked and looked for it about a year ago and could only find stupid other autopay settings (like, pay the exact same dollar amount every month). So for BOA I just do a "push" auto pay from my bank's bill pay function.
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Re: Bank of America credit card “feature” (be careful with autopay)

Post by Dandy »

I am old school. Send me a bill and I'll use bill pay and schedule payments. I could see a benefit if you travel a lot or when your mental facilities decline.

I think the key bill to pay is health insurance since I fear that could be a cause to cancel or be a source of confusion especially if a covered person is having health issues. Lucky our health insurance is Medicare and retiree insurance and premiums are deducted from SS and pension.
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Re: Bank of America credit card “feature” (be careful with autopay)

Post by Nate79 »

Amex will do this as well.
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damjam
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Re: Bank of America credit card “feature” (be careful with autopay)

Post by damjam »

Dandy wrote: Tue Sep 18, 2018 9:43 am I am old school. Send me a bill and I'll use bill pay and schedule payments. I could see a benefit if you travel a lot or when your mental facilities decline.

I think the key bill to pay is health insurance since I fear that could be a cause to cancel or be a source of confusion especially if a covered person is having health issues. Lucky our health insurance is Medicare and retiree insurance and premiums are deducted from SS and pension.
When I used to get paper statements, I had a statement fail to show up on two occasions over the past 30+ years. I missed my payment both times. My fault obviously, I should have tracked it better. However, autopay eliminates this problem. BofA and Pen Fed have poor implementation of this service. Other cards that I have do not do this.
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Re: Bank of America credit card “feature” (be careful with autopay)

Post by Dandy »

I had a statement fail to show up on two occasions over the past 30+ years. I missed my payment both times.
I recently noticed that a credit card statement was late. I track my monthly expenses to see if my run rate is changing. I called, told them to send me another statement and paid them on that call from my checking account. No late fee. A miss or 2 in 30 years is pretty good. If you have a good and long track record no fee might be your outcome too.
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Re: Bank of America credit card “feature” (be careful with autopay)

Post by MikeG62 »

UpperNwGuy wrote: Tue Sep 18, 2018 7:48 am There is another internet forum that focuses on credit cards and credit scores in which many of the members use autopay. Nearly every week someone posts about a problem involving an unintended credit card overpayment because the cardholder did a manual payment even though they had set up autopay. Seems pretty obvious to me that a person should do one or the other, but not both.

As for me, I hate autopay and use it only for Medicare, iCloud, and my storage unit. Never on credit cards.
Agree with the highlighted section.

I use autopay on every one of our many CC's, except my wife's store-branded cards (as those are used infrequently and I want to be sure I check with her before any payments are made). I have never had a problem with any unintended consequences. Prior statement balances are paid in full, net of any credits issued on returns in the month. I do download and review all CC' statements with charges in the month to ensure everything is as intended and to set the payment in my e-check register (as well as add the spend on our expense tracking spreadsheets).

As an aside, I also have alerts set up on all my CC's to let me know any time a charge is made where the card is not present. This June when we landed in the airport upon returning from Curacao I got an alert indicating my Chase Sapphire Reserve CC had been charged around $160 at Walmart.com (minutes earlier). Since I only use my CSR card for travel and dining or purchases outside the US as there are no FTF's (not to mention we were in flight when the charge was made) I knew this was a fraudulent charge. I contacted Chase while waiting to get our bags off baggage claim and they closed the card on the spot. The charge had not even posted yet (it was still pending). It's just another reason not to worry about autopay. I'm not going to pay for something I did not purchase (too many trip wires in place to prevent that from happening).
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Re: Bank of America credit card “feature” (be careful with autopay)

Post by investor997 »

feehater wrote: Tue Sep 18, 2018 9:27 am Does BOA even have a standard "pay the full amount of last month's bill" autopay setting? I looked and looked for it about a year ago and could only find stupid other autopay settings (like, pay the exact same dollar amount every month). So for BOA I just do a "push" auto pay from my bank's bill pay function.
They do at least in theory, and the only way to set it up (as far as I can tell) is to have your BofA Checking Account "push" the payment via eBills. Even then, if you configure BillPay to "Pay the amount due", for some reason it only schedules a minimum payment to go through.
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Re: Bank of America credit card “feature” (be careful with autopay)

Post by SpaethCo »

feehater wrote: Tue Sep 18, 2018 9:27 am Does BOA even have a standard "pay the full amount of last month's bill" autopay setting?
As far as I know, there are 2 ways autopay can be setup with BoA:
  1. Using the Bill Pay system. It will setup the credit card to generate an eBill, and a payment is scheduled based on that eBill and your choice to pay the minimum, full statement balance, or a fixed amount. Payments automatically scheduled show up under "payment activity"
  2. Not sure if this is still available, but you could submit paperwork to enable autopay through BoA's back-end systems. That system was not accessible via the online portal -- if you needed to make changes to a payment you had to call and talk to a call center rep.
There are quite a few banks where the autopay system is disconnected from the credit card system, so it is unaware of other payments or credits. In addition to BoA, I've had that same situation with Capital One, US Bank / Elan, Barclays, plus a few credit unions.
investor997 wrote: Tue Sep 18, 2018 10:22 am if you configure BillPay to "Pay the amount due", for some reason it only schedules a minimum payment to go through.
This is where BoA is sneakier than most banks. They equate "pay the amount due" as "minimum payment due" instead of "full statement balance." They do give you the full statement balance option though:

Image
Last edited by SpaethCo on Tue Sep 18, 2018 10:29 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Bank of America credit card “feature” (be careful with autopay)

Post by bertilak »

UpperNwGuy wrote: Tue Sep 18, 2018 7:57 am
bertilak wrote: Tue Sep 18, 2018 7:50 am
wangarific wrote: Tue Sep 18, 2018 6:33 am ... but why did you manually pay when you had autopay set up already?
I use autopay as a fail-safe mechanism. I pay my credit card balance manually several times a month but have autopay enabled just in case I mess up.
But why?
AHA! You are questioning "several times a month!" I misunderstood that earlier. There are two related reasons:
  1. I can better track my cash flow if I don't let a big CC balance build up "behind the scenes."
  2. Credit bureaus don't like to see big balances so keeping the balances at a reasonable level keeps them happy. I could deal with this more precisely if I knew exactly when the CC balance was reported. Periodic payments synced with actual income is a lazy way do deal with it.
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damjam
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Re: Bank of America credit card “feature” (be careful with autopay)

Post by damjam »

SpaethCo wrote: Tue Sep 18, 2018 10:23 am There are quite a few banks where the autopay system is disconnected from the credit card system, so it is unaware of other payments or credits. In addition to BoA, I've had that same situation with Capital One, US Bank / Elan, Barclays, plus a few credit unions.
That explains a lot. Thank you.
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Re: Bank of America credit card “feature” (be careful with autopay)

Post by nolesrule »

bertilak wrote: Tue Sep 18, 2018 10:26 am
UpperNwGuy wrote: Tue Sep 18, 2018 7:57 am
bertilak wrote: Tue Sep 18, 2018 7:50 am
wangarific wrote: Tue Sep 18, 2018 6:33 am ... but why did you manually pay when you had autopay set up already?
I use autopay as a fail-safe mechanism. I pay my credit card balance manually several times a month but have autopay enabled just in case I mess up.
But why?
AHA! You are questioning "several times a month!" I misunderstood that earlier. There are two related reasons:
  1. I can better track my cash flow if I don't let a big CC balance build up "behind the scenes."
  2. Credit bureaus don't like to see big balances so keeping the balances at a reasonable level keeps them happy. I could deal with this more precisely if I knew exactly when the CC balance was reported. Periodic payments synced with actual income is a lazy way do deal with it.
Statement balances are the only balance reported to the credit bureaus. Usually within a few days of the close of the billing period.
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Re: Bank of America credit card “feature” (be careful with autopay)

Post by bertilak »

nolesrule wrote: Tue Sep 18, 2018 11:01 am Statement balances are the only balance reported to the credit bureaus. Usually within a few days of the close of the billing period.
That was my guess. When I called to check, the person I talked to did not seem to understand what I was asking. Since the answer wasn't that important I let it drop.
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Re: Bank of America credit card “feature” (be careful with autopay)

Post by PVW »

feehater wrote: Tue Sep 18, 2018 9:27 am Does BOA even have a standard "pay the full amount of last month's bill" autopay setting? I looked and looked for it about a year ago and could only find stupid other autopay settings (like, pay the exact same dollar amount every month). So for BOA I just do a "push" auto pay from my bank's bill pay function.
I couldn't find it either. There isn't even an option to pay balance when you do it manually - you have to type in the amount you want to pay. BOA online bill pay looks like it was written in the 90s and never updated. It's the main reason I'm going to cancel my BOA card.
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Re: Bank of America credit card “feature” (be careful with autopay)

Post by feehater »

SpaethCo wrote: Tue Sep 18, 2018 10:23 am
feehater wrote: Tue Sep 18, 2018 9:27 am Does BOA even have a standard "pay the full amount of last month's bill" autopay setting?
As far as I know, there are 2 ways autopay can be setup with BoA:
  1. Using the Bill Pay system. It will setup the credit card to generate an eBill, and a payment is scheduled based on that eBill and your choice to pay the minimum, full statement balance, or a fixed amount. Payments automatically scheduled show up under "payment activity"

This is the bill pay system attached to the BOA checking account right? Or does this also allow you to set up an autopay from a non BOA checking account?
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Re: Bank of America credit card “feature” (be careful with autopay)

Post by SpaethCo »

feehater wrote: Tue Sep 18, 2018 1:01 pmThis is the bill pay system attached to the BOA checking account right? Or does this also allow you to set up an autopay from a non BOA checking account?
It's just the bill pay system attached to your BoA online account, you can link external accounts to use for payments:

Image

All my payments are processed to transfer out of a credit union account; I have never had a BoA checking account.
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Re: Bank of America credit card “feature” (be careful with autopay)

Post by Earl Lemongrab »

The only thing I have on autopay now is my COBRA payments. The consequences of a problem there is substantial. With other things, the payment process forces me to access and review the account.
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Re: Bank of America credit card “feature” (be careful with autopay)

Post by inbox788 »

student wrote: Tue Sep 18, 2018 6:33 am
spectec wrote: Tue Sep 18, 2018 6:27 am Personally, I use auto pay very sparingly, and only for recurring exact amounts ( such as home mortgage, insurance premiums, etc). No auto pay for credit cards, utilities, etc for me - just too many ways for the process to get tripped up. Such as when I got an erroneous $2,000 water bill a couple of years back. That took about 3 months to get sorted out, but at least they weren't holding my money the whole time. I prefer to "push" the money out to them electronically rather than having them "pull" the money out of my accounts.
I used the same principle for a long time but I finally gave up on utilities. One idea maybe the following. Open a credit card with low credit limit for utilities bills.
I was paranoid about that when I first learned about autopay, so didn't sign up. Years later, they finally came up with limits, so I now automatically pay the balance of my utility bill up to $100 (or higher in specific instances). So far, only one or twice has the payment not gone through. Right now, if the amount is over the limit, it won't pay anything. I wish (and have suggested) they pay the limit, so at least i have a partial payment of $100 whether the $2000 bill is correct or not, but so far, they haven't implemented that additional option.

Also, I fear I might forget or die and the account keeps auto paying for years, so I set a 12 month limit (now I've been raising to 24), and once in a while extend it another 12 months. Only once has the payment stopped and I forget what was the trigger that notified me, but I actually had a bill due. The main trouble with autopay is I don't pay as much attention to my bills anymore, and I suspect this is common, so companies will take advantage of this and make more "mistakes" or opt you into extra fee services. Sure, they'll correct them, but you have to catch them first.
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Re: Bank of America credit card “feature” (be careful with autopay)

Post by mariezzz »

28fe6 wrote: Tue Sep 18, 2018 6:24 am I cancelled both my BOA cards because out of all my cards, they were the least convenient to pay. They actually wanted me to come into a branch and sign papers in order to set up auto pay from my online bank. Every step of the way, they tried to get me to set up a BOA checking account to "make it easy". Good riddance.
+1. B of Am has no idea what customer service or convenience is.
I do not allow autopay on credit cards at all. Only my mortgage is set up that way out of my checking account.
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munemaker
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Re: Bank of America credit card “feature” (be careful with autopay)

Post by munemaker »

damjam wrote: Tue Sep 18, 2018 9:50 am
Dandy wrote: Tue Sep 18, 2018 9:43 am I am old school. Send me a bill and I'll use bill pay and schedule payments. I could see a benefit if you travel a lot or when your mental facilities decline.

I think the key bill to pay is health insurance since I fear that could be a cause to cancel or be a source of confusion especially if a covered person is having health issues. Lucky our health insurance is Medicare and retiree insurance and premiums are deducted from SS and pension.
When I used to get paper statements, I had a statement fail to show up on two occasions over the past 30+ years. I missed my payment both times. My fault obviously, I should have tracked it better. However, autopay eliminates this problem. BofA and Pen Fed have poor implementation of this service. Other cards that I have do not do this.
Back in the days of paper statements, I had a few occasions when I did not receive statements. You call the CC company and they will waive the interest and late fee if you ask. EXCEPT ONCE...Target - The agent was hard nosed and said he did not believe me and would not waive the charges. I told him to cancel the card then. He transferred me to whatever department (account retention) takes care of cancelling. They apologized for their agent's behavior and waived all the fees/charges and I kept the card. Kind of a bad cop/good cop situation, I guess.
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damjam
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Re: Bank of America credit card “feature” (be careful with autopay)

Post by damjam »

munemaker wrote: Tue Sep 18, 2018 7:43 pm
damjam wrote: Tue Sep 18, 2018 9:50 am
Dandy wrote: Tue Sep 18, 2018 9:43 am I am old school. Send me a bill and I'll use bill pay and schedule payments. I could see a benefit if you travel a lot or when your mental facilities decline.

I think the key bill to pay is health insurance since I fear that could be a cause to cancel or be a source of confusion especially if a covered person is having health issues. Lucky our health insurance is Medicare and retiree insurance and premiums are deducted from SS and pension.
When I used to get paper statements, I had a statement fail to show up on two occasions over the past 30+ years. I missed my payment both times. My fault obviously, I should have tracked it better. However, autopay eliminates this problem. BofA and Pen Fed have poor implementation of this service. Other cards that I have do not do this.
Back in the days of paper statements, I had a few occasions when I did not receive statements. You call the CC company and they will waive the interest and late fee if you ask. EXCEPT ONCE...Target - The agent was hard nosed and said he did not believe me and would not waive the charges. I told him to cancel the card then. He transferred me to whatever department (account retention) takes care of cancelling. They apologized for their agent's behavior and waived all the fees/charges and I kept the card. Kind of a bad cop/good cop situation, I guess.
Glad that it worked out for you.
Unfortunately the first time it happened I was 19 I think. It was a Sears card and the statement got sent to my old address even though I had forwarding set at the Post Office. Yeah, never trusted USPS mail forwarding service again. I was too young to get any respect and had no idea how to solve that.
The next time was maybe 10 years ago. The card company BofA was not very helpful. I did try however. Ended up cancelling the card, which was a mistake because the late payment stayed on my credit file longer that way.
bradpevans
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Re: Bank of America credit card “feature” (be careful with autopay)

Post by bradpevans »

Huge autopay fan

I have to imagine the number of people on this forum that carry a balance is near zero

So why not have autopay full balance set up on every card
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Jags4186
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Re: Bank of America credit card “feature” (be careful with autopay)

Post by Jags4186 »

Just to update you all, Bank of America is completely incompetent.

I called last night—they told me there’s a hold on the payment I need to call back their credit department between 8-7. Fine.

I call at 8 this morning to the credit department, after spending 30 minutes with a person calling my payment bank, verifying the payment, etc. etc. I get told that everything is good, just need to transfer me to customer service to refund the money. I get transferred and am told that I need to call the credit department to release the hold. I explain to the woman I just did that and she says to do it again and call back the number and then disconnects from me.

As soon as I get the money back I’m closing the card.
student
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Re: Bank of America credit card “feature” (be careful with autopay)

Post by student »

You may find this article interesting. https://www.creditcards.com/credit-card ... d-1282.php I think there is another way to get your money back without talking to anybody. You do a cash advance but you need to make sure that you do not use the card for anything so you get a 0 balance get the end of statement period.
jrbdmb
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Re: Bank of America credit card “feature” (be careful with autopay)

Post by jrbdmb »

wangarific wrote: Tue Sep 18, 2018 6:33 am Stinks it still went through (but like others, it sounds like you paid after they scheduled it), but why did you manually pay when you had autopay set up already?
In my case, I will be sending manual payments later today because the autopay that I set up on five (!) BoA accounts last month have now resulted in exactly *zero* payments on those cards by today's due date, even though i set things up to pay the bills five days before due. :annoyed
bwalling
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Re: Bank of America credit card “feature” (be careful with autopay)

Post by bwalling »

bradpevans wrote: Tue Sep 18, 2018 8:15 pm Huge autopay fan

I have to imagine the number of people on this forum that carry a balance is near zero

So why not have autopay full balance set up on every card
Just depends on the person. If you're fairly organized, then you're fine paying yourself, and you prefer to catch billing errors before you pay. If you're like me, you're a disorganized mess, and autopay is better because otherwise you'd wind up with all kinds of late fees from missed payments. I catch billing errors after the fact and have to work on resolving them usually after they've already taken my money.

If you send me physical mail, I'll pay you. If you send me only an "eStatement", I'll miss it, especially if you spam me with dozens of nonsense offers, marketing emails, etc. Emailing me 12 times per month, only one of which is the bill I need to address is a sure fire way for me to miss it because I've learned to ignore you.
MrJedi
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Re: Bank of America credit card “feature” (be careful with autopay)

Post by MrJedi »

This is not uncommon. I've seen a mix of lenders who will adjust the autopayment and also those who will not. There is no industry standard, so it is important to know what your particular lender will do.

If you like to pay manually, you may want to pay BEFORE the statement cuts so that there is no balance due and thus no auto payment.

Another option is to autopay only the minimum. If you miss your manual payment, there is no late fee and a very minor interest charge if you catch it quickly (which you should if you are habitually paying manually). This would prevent cases of massive overpayments due to a full statement balance getting both manually payed and automatically payed.

Personally I just let auto pay do its thing. I only ever prepay before a statement if I know I'm applying for credit/loan soon to minimize my utilization. Most lenders report statement balance (the one main exception I know is US Bank / Elan which reports the balance on the last business day of the month, regardless of statement cycle).
RichK
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Re: Bank of America credit card “feature” (be careful with autopay)

Post by RichK »

We pay as many bills as possible with credit cards. We charge nearly everything with a variety of cards depending on which one is giving us the best deal. We hardly ever use cash.

We autopay the full balance for all of our credit cards. And we autopay other expenses that we can't charge (like property taxes).

We know from long experience the safe amount to have in our checking account to ensure we won't get in any trouble and we adjust to that amount at the end of each month. There is only one month where this is an issue (August summer property taxes), and we have an annual automated payment coming from Ally Savings to cover it.

Everything works very smoothly and requires very minimal maintenance. Just a once-a-month checking account adjustment with the corresponding movement of cash to/from Savings or Brokerage accounts.
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