[...] Get Rich Slowly » Personal Finance Puzzlers: The Check is in the Mail (tags: bank usps warning) [...]

I had an auto payment check initiated using my bank’s online bill pay get lost in the mail. Luckily, I keep on top of these things. The auto-loan company didn’t care about my bank losing the check in the mail – they did allow me to initiate a 1-time phone payment to cover the bill. Eventually, the check showed up and I had a double payment on record – what a nightmare. If you initiate via the site of the company you’re paying, you have more recourse and can avoid double payments, etc.

I am curious what would have happened if you hadn’t made that extra payment and just let the check get there when it got there. It would have (barely!) not been 30 days late, so they couldn’t have reported it on your credit report. Also, isn’t it the law that a company has to accept a payment based on its postmarked date, not the date it’s actually received?

Yep. I’ve been doing that for almost a year, and it’s really helped me get control of my bills & avoid late fees. I don’t have anything on auto-debit; that way lies complacency. But all of my bills are listed in one spot on my credit union website, I can view the amount due (an average guess for some bills, a number pulled from electronic invoicing on others), the due date, and the most recent payments, all on one web page. I get e-mail notices if I haven’t submitted a payment when the due date is approaching. And nothing is *ever* late …

Last year about October, we mailed a payment. Payments are due on the 15th of each month. They called us at the beginning of November asking for a payment or it would show on our credit record. So we sent another one.
A couple of weeks later we got another call, still no payment. So we made one over the phone using the $8 outsourced check processing option. (The only option other than having the amount taken out of our checking account automatically. Husband and I have proven time and again that this is BAD NEWS for us.)

About 2 weeks later, we get another call that our November payment is late. Huh? There are 2 checks floating out there in lala land, plus a pay by phone! They still have not gotten either of the mailed checks. We made another $8-fee pay by phone.

About a week later, we get a notice from the post office that they had a mutilated check/envelope and it was destroyed. A photocopy was included. Well, there’s one missing check. The other came through about the time they called us to ask for our late December payment. It was NOT applied towards our January payment. It was over 60 days after we had mailed the original.

At this point, we wait for the payment to be almost a month late, GMAC to call us, and we make the payment by phone. This costs us $8 for the processing fee and $16 for the late fees, but I refuse to trust GMAC *or* the postal system with this payment anymore.

But, for your situation, I probably would have canceled the original check when you decided to do a different payment option.

Also, that check situation is a very curious one indeed. I doubt I would have handled it so well.

I update Quicken daily to keep track of what has cleared as well as sign on to my online banking and see pending transactions.

One other thing I use is a matrix in Excel that maps my income and expenses on a bi-weekly basis (yes, I’m still living paycheck to paycheck). This allows me to see what bills need to be paid when, and out of which check. I’m also building an emergency fund so I can track how much should be deposited into my savings account for the emergency fund I’m building. Even when I’m not paycheck to paycheck, a $0 budget still works wonderfully.