The Good Life on a Budget

• Posted by JvW on January 27th, 2008 filed in Credit Card, Debt

I made a mistake. This seems to be a theme recently. Back in November, we transferred one of our credit cards to a 0% offer. The old credit card, my husband’s Amex, was paid off! Rejoice! Champagne flowed from the heavens. I then deleted it completely from my memory.

Which was a very bad idea.

Two or three times a week, I open up Quicken (aff.), download my transactions from my checking account and pay my bills. I update my credit card balance in Quicken once a week or so, as I’m not using the cards for anything. Or so I thought. Turns out, I forgot about one teensy little detail. The automatic payment for tolls I had set up long ago in the days of yore on the Amex. Back in the days when all payments for all things were set up on credit cards. They slowly migrated over to the bank account, but our toll payments were like a weakly, sick herd member. Irregular. Unreliable. Fell right on through the cracks.

After paying off the Amex in November, I didn’t open it, look at it, think of it until last week. We were signed up for paperless statements, so nothing comes in the mail. When I did log in to the account, much to my dismay, there was a balance of $171.97. Consisting of some residual interest (that I forgot about), two toll charges (that I forgot about) and two late fees. The computer demanded $74.04 past due! Pay now! I paid the past due amount last week and the remainder today. And felt like a horrible person pretty much ever since I found my error.

The Amex is the only card that is entirely in my husband’s name. I have one in my name only as well, to keep some aspects of our credit histories and scores separate. If this were my credit card, I wouldn’t feel quite so bad. At least then my mistake would affect my credit. I have never had a bill this far past due (over 30 days), so I have no idea what this is going to do to his credit. Amex already shot up the interest rate from a so-so 16.99% to an astronomical 29.24%. I will be checking our credit reports in the beginning of February, but I have no baseline to compare to. We’ll see if the late and overdue balance is included in his credit history.

The take-home lesson here is: don’t forget to check your cards that have been paid off. My new version of Quicken automatically downloads all our account at once, which will prevent this from happening again. That and the fact that I already switched the toll payments to our bank account.