Putting things off

I have a task this month that I am SOOOOOO not looking forward to doing.

My bank card expires this month.

Do you know how many things are paid through that card?

Neither. Do. I.

A couple places have been nice, proactive, and sent me notices reminding me the card they have on file is about to expire.

I’ve even kept some of those notices.

One of them was the auto insurance & I can only say “THANK GOD” because I thought they were auto debiting us with the account number, not the card and I would never have contacted them with the new card number until I started getting “OH MY GOD YOU HAVEN’T PAID US” notices and I would have been all indignant because they HAVE my information or how else have they been getting paid all these years?

I’m a set it & forget it bill payer in case you haven’t noticed. I’ve got my life arranged so the only bill that fluctuates even the slightest is the phone bill & I auto send them $2 over so if I don’t look at the bill for a few months I don’t come up too far short if the rates change due to the credit balance I usually carry.

Yes, I know I should look at all my bills every time but I hate the phone company & opening their bills ruins my whole day even if there is nothing but the regular charges in it

There are bills I have set to send out auto payments & there are bills that auto debit me & there is the electric bill which I pay in cash in person because the electric company & my bank are engaged in acts of mutual hostility & I always seem to get caught in the crossfire. I no longer trust either one of them to send or receive payment unless in my presence.

I can see easily what I am sending out. But it’s much harder to sort out how people are taking money out. The bank statements just say “Insurance company – $98” not, ‘via card’ or ‘via direct withdrawal’. And even if it did, it could be DH’s card & not mine that they have on file. His cards don’t expire anytime soon.

Any new debt contracted in the past 3 years would have my bank card number because I haven’t owned a check book in that time & have no clue what my account number might be to give to people.

But I  haven’t added any new debiting debtors. New people are all me sending out auto pays.

So I have to call everyone who regularly appears on my bank statement & ask them if they have my card number. They’ll probably ask me if I have an account number and I’ll be all “Dude, I don’t even know how I am paying you! Do you really think I have an account number handy? Do I sound at all like that sort of organized person?” and we’ll have to play guessing games about security questions, which could have been set up by DH and I have no idea what the name of his favorite childhood pet was. Not to mention my hated of voice controlled automated systems that never understand half the numbers I say & I end up screaming OPERATOR and AGENT into the phone until a live human being answers. They always point out I could have made the changes with the automated system.

And there are always those, like life insurance policies, who only charge me once or twice a year who I won’t see unless they have charged me in the past few months. I suppose I’ll hear from them when the payment fails.

oh..BTW.. They are coming to take my internet providing blight on the landscape tomorrow. Probably. I’m hoping for snow & high winds so they can’t. I’m guessing they will also be erecting the pole to replace it. No one said anything about that though.

So if you hear of a ‘tense standoff’ and ‘hostage situation’ in the Mid Atlantic area tomorrow you know they tried to drive off and leave me with no internet & I just couldn’t allow that to happen.