Thursday, August 30, 2018

The double edged sword of Autopay

In the year 2011 my wife signed a contract with the new  security alarm company For our house in Plano Texas. she basically fell for the sales talk of the young man who came to sell the service. as usual like we all do signed a number of contract forms without reading all the small printed legalese.
2 years after this happened  due to various circumstances we were forced to sell the house and a short notice.
 as a convenience we had signed up for auto-pay directly from my bank account.
 after selling the house I had called the security alarm company Monitronics and ask them to cancel the service because I was no longer owning the home and did not need a security alarm.
 I was informed that because of the contract signed by my wife I will have to pay 7 years worth of monthly payments before my contract can be cancel. I was generously offered the choice I'm getting the same service transferred to  the new owner.

 when I asked the new one or he was least interested in having the security around from this company. so we moved out of Plano two three different cities during all this time I have been paying the monthly charges automatically from my bank account.

 today  due to the shocking development I am being forced to leave the country When I call the company which has changed its name from Monitronics to Moni and later to Brinks Security Services. I was informed that my service contract ran out almost a year ago. but my bank account has been debited regularly every month not only that some months ago without any information to me.

 so the moral of the story is try not to pay your bills as much as possible.
And if you are forced to autopay for any reason make sure at the end of the month you balance your bank account and check all the charges in your credit card account and bank account.
 you may be surprised how many companies are making millions of dollars from stupid people like me who sign up for a number of free trials thinking that we can discontinue them after the trial. Is over only to forget about them keep paying monthly installments two services which we are not using.

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