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Lodestar, when you have a CC with fraudulent charges you just dispute them and they are removed instead of canceling the card. I have never had a new card come with charges but it’s an easy fix. I can’t imagine traveling to another country without one.
That's not been our experience. BoA is very good about detecting potentially fraudulent charges and contacting us. If they are fraudulent, the card is immediately canceled and they send us cards with a new account #. This takes several days.
We can no longer pay our utilities in person and they mail the bills late, the billing department is out of state. To pay online they have instituted a merchant fee that we must pay.
This is irritating but you can almost always avoid it by paying directly from your bank account. When you use a credit card for any payment or purchase, the recipient has to pay a fee. The merchant fee you mention is their way of passing that fee back to you.
Pay with your bank account, there is no fee to either one of you.
On the topic of getting along without modern technology, I have friends my age (mid-50s) who have steadfastly refused to "give in" and get smartphones. They have flip phones, which of course can only be used for conversations. Recently this couple plus their three children (all under 15; they had kids later in life) were traveling and after they'd boarded the plane, an announcement was made that the plane was over weight-I suspect some very important, last-minute heavy cargo--and that a certain number of people needed to leave the flight and take another one. In compensation, each would receive a $2000 Visa gift card.
My friends, realizing that a few hours of inconvenience for the five of them would net them $10k, promptly got up and deplaned. Then the comedy began as the airline wanted to load the "gift card" money onto their smartphones, and my friends didn't have one. A search began throughout the airport for loadable, physical gift cards and by the time they were found, the friends had missed the original connection and were given a different one from a different airport which necessitated an Uber ride--and just try scheduling an Uber without a smartphone.
Long story short, they got home and they got their money, but suffice it to say that it finally dawned on them that they were making their lives very unnecessarily difficult by insisting on "living in the 20th century."
We can no longer pay our utilities in person and they mail the bills late, the billing department is out of state. To pay online they have instituted a merchant fee that we must pay.
Use your bank's bill pay instead... no fees at all!
LMAO, that's a good story. How did he get to be boss?
I was living in a very rural area in Ontario for a time. We had satellite Internet, and there was never going to be anything better because it would not be worth the expense to any company to run miles of fiber optics to serve a few people, most of whom were not there for the winter anyway.
Because he was very, very good at his job. He was one of the better bosses I've had. Very personable, we got along well. Often had lunch together with several of us from the office where these discussions took place. He just had some very, uh, impractical, views on how people should live. On the positive side, he very much practiced what he preached as a way of life. On the downside, very few people could live that type of lifestyle. Which was why he was divorced.
Use your bank's bill pay instead... no fees at all!
My Dw has been using our bank's bill pay for a few years. It is very easy to use, but. Keep in mind the bank prints out each check and mails them. We have begun having problems with it.
One company [our fire suppression company] has corporate offices in other states where they wish to receive payment, but for some reason, the USPS refuses to deliver mail at that address. I have spoken with them many times, and they refuse to speak with their local PostMaster to fix the issue. But insist that we keep mailing them checks. We get the envelopes returned to us as 'undeliverable', which I scan and email as proof that we tried to make payments.
My Dw has been using our bank's bill pay for a few years. It is very easy to use, but. Keep in mind the bank prints out each check and mails them. We have begun having problems with it.
One company [our fire suppression company] has corporate offices in other states where they wish to receive payment, but for some reason, the USPS refuses to deliver mail at that address. I have spoken with them many times, and they refuse to speak with their local PostMaster to fix the issue. But insist that we keep mailing them checks. We get the envelopes returned to us as 'undeliverable', which I scan and email as proof that we tried to make payments.
The bank only mails out checks to the companies that don’t accept online payments. Very few of mine won’t accept them so very few are actually mailed a check.
I don't feel that compelled to be all up-to-date and modern, per 21st century ideals.
I use my smartphone very little. I don't watch TV, and don't keep up with all the new dumb shows. I listen primarily to music from the 1970s. I read a lot of books of the 19th century (events and authors from that century). I get paper bills, pay them with checks, and stick them in the mail. I even still use an old computer running Windows 95. It's not for online activities, but for document, worksheet, imaging, and music tasks.
No problems or difficulties selecting just what's necessary of now, while retaining most of my traditional approaches and items. I like my blend of old and new. Highly personal and customized.
I don't feel that compelled to be all up-to-date and modern, per 21st century ideals.
I use my smartphone very little. I don't watch TV, and don't keep up with all the new dumb shows. I listen primarily to music from the 1970s. I read a lot of books of the 19th century (events and authors from that century). I get paper bills, pay them with checks, and stick them in the mail. I even still use an old computer running Windows 95. It's not for online activities, but for document, worksheet, imaging, and music tasks.
No problems or difficulties selecting just what's necessary of now, while retaining most of my traditional approaches and items. I like my blend of old and new. Highly personal and customized.
Similar thing here for my smartphone operates under the philosophy of ...... if it falls into unenlightened hands, it can tell them very little.
Now one may say, "Well, just lock it with a password and all is safe!" but between A: reports we are getting all the time of hacking and B: government efforts to bypass those passwords, at the very least, this believed security isn't going to last forever.
To say nothing of this piece of plastic that we all carry around has, supposedly, so much of our lives wrapped up it......so what happens if it is lost?
I’m only 38 and I checked out of the tech game 20 years ago. I grew up in Silicon Valley where a lot of this stuff was dreamed up, and quickly saw the downsides - a constant need for “up”grading gets expensive, and all the early adopter fails made me very, very wary. I am to the point where I froze my tech mostly in the 90s and have no desire to use apps for everything. That’s just a foreign concept to me.
I've wondered if one of the keys to cutting health care expenses is to close some of these hospitals and require those in rural areas to come to the big cities to get anything more than emergency care and family medicine.
.
That's already happening in rural New Mexico. 70-95 miles to Santa Fe (and even farther to ABQ for anything other than ER and family medicine. One of the main reasons I no longer live there.
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