Pay attention people..................................

A couple of posts ago I shared the lengths I went to for fifty cents. Random wrote a comment in which she posed the question "Do you know how much money the bank would be making if they did that to every single account?" Exactly! Lots of people don't pay attention to every single statement they receive, or have the time to check out every little mistake. This translates to profit for the company. Here is my latest example:

My youngest never had any desire to have her own phone, but once she started diving around for work needed one. A month or so ago we added her to our plan. I will plead ignorance here, when they were setting up the plan the guy went over how I was getting twenty dollar charges and then twenty dollar credits until the point where I just quit listening. The first bill was in line with the old bill so I didn't inspect it. Have you ever tried to read one of those things? We have Nextel, and three phones. The bill is nine pages long and broken up in so many different ways that a rocket scientist would have trouble understanding it.

This month, my bill jumped from low hundred dollars to one hundred forty-five dollars. I have to say my first thought was "the kid had used too many minutes chatting with her friends and she is going to have a nice phone bill to pay. In order to understand exactly where the charges came from before giving her the bill I called the company to get help understanding the bill. The very nice woman I talked with looked at our plan and found that my daughter's phone was not on our family plan, and this is what had raised the bill. I LOVE that she was honest when her response to, "Well, how did this happen when I had requested that all three phones be put on the plan," with "Trying to figure that out would give both of us a BIG headache!" We just moved on and through the magic of credits I won't know what my real bill will be for another two statements.

My point is to say it does pay off to take the time to read your bill statements beyond the "amount due." If you don't understand the bill call the company and make them do their job. The money you save just might translate into your next vacation. I got back $45.50 in less than one week.