I just opened by truck lease payment. It is due in 18 days and it will be paid tomorrow, that is the habit, get the bill, pay the bill.

My statement shows a late charge, roughly $20. My bank account shows the money coming out of my account eight days before the due date last month. It took me 26 minutes on the phone, pushing one to be irritated, 2 to be irritated more and 4 to get infuriated before speaking to a body. The reason, said the recording was an unusually high call volume. Yeah, no kidding everyone was complaining about the mysterious late charge!

They were gracious enough to remove the charge after finding the error. They were not so eager to reimburse me for my time. You see my time is worth money, missed time with my kids is double time.

This is really an issue with me,I will tell you why in a minute, and it is becoming a standard operating procedure for many issuers of credit. Here is the proof Providian ; Ford Motor Credit ; Misc. you get the idea.

I grew up working in the Family Mortgage bank, not the loan broker of today; a real live mortgage bank, more like the Bailey Building & Loan in Its A Wonderful Life (one of my favorite movies). We had thousands of loans out worth over a half a billion dollars. We collected payments, processed payoffs and handled a disgusting amount of money. Payments were all due on the first of the month. Borrowers had until the 15th to make their payment with no penalty, on the 16th we collected 5% of the payment as a late charge, pure profit all of it. To put this into prospective I would take between $900,000 and $1,100,000 in payments to the bank on the 14th and usually well over $1,500,000 on the 15th. We would also stay open after the bank run, sometimes until seven o'clock to make sure we collected payment from everyone who wanted to pay (closing time was always 5pm). If we would have just not processed mail payments on the 14th and 15th we could have generated over $60,000 a month in additional profit. That is $720,000 a year in free money, not bad for a company with 14 employees and one location!

The sick thing is someone will read this and think I am an idiot for not doing it!

We would have never, ever thought of doing this. It was the total opposite; calling clients with reminders to pay, staying open late, basically whatever we could do help people. We lived in the community and knew we were helping people realize a dream, no need to penalize them. Oh yeah we also had the lowest foreclosure rate in the country in one of Americas highest states.

My point is not only did we not screw people we went out of our way to help them. That is the way I was raised, that is the way I still do business. Now I want the company that leased me my Suburban to pay me for my time, is that unreasonable?

If 1000 people had this happen, and I bet that is a very low number, and called that is 500 hours of wasted time, lets see what this did to the economy....500 hours at say $50 an hour $25,000 plus what ever it cost the finance company for toll free per 30,000 minutes plus staff. ok a measly $33,000 give or take total waste, tops $8000 for the loan sharks.

If 1000 people missed the the charge and paid it....$20,000 gain. Now lets look at the reality...this company probably has over 5,000,000 loans outstanding. If they do this once a year to every client and 30% slide through that is 1.5 million or north of $20,000,000 a year screwing people.

You think this is crazy....Providian paid out over $400,000,000 to settle two lawsuits in the year 2000 alone.

Go look and pay attention to your bills!

Remember good old fashion mugging, at least you knew you were being robbed.