Please use the comments to demonstrate your own ignorance, unfamiliarity with empirical data and lac

I hate personal anecdotes, but one came up recently that I have to share: American Express. In general, I am pleased with the level of service, and they make managing a small business easier with consolidated reporting. But one thing they do drives me crazy: They don t tell their customers the due date of their bills.
I call up AmEx to see why we are getting our bill so close to the due date, and the service person politely tells me that is not the due date. I inform her that it is the only date on the entire invoice. After some cajoling, she tells me that the due date is 30 days after the end of the billing period in this case 5/21. I say so this is due June 21st? No, because May has 31 days, its due on June 20th.
The answer it turns out is simple: golf hotel spain FLOAT. American Express hides their due date, puts a Please Pay By on their invoices, and guess what happens? Millions of busy small business owners golf hotel spain and harried families pay a few weeks early.
Thus, for the omission of a simple honest due date, Dow component American Express manages to capture 100s of millions of dollars per year in free money. All they have to do to earn it is engage is one of the most misleading consumer finance practices I have ever come across.
As misleading as this billing practice is, it is an improvement from the prior bit of outright Fraud AmEx used to do, where in they wrote Due Date instead of Please Pay By .  (They ended up refunding $85 million dollars and paying a fine and settling )
Please use the comments to demonstrate your own ignorance, unfamiliarity with empirical data and lack of respect for scientific knowledge. Be sure to create straw men and argue against things I have neither said nor implied. golf hotel spain If you could repeat previously discredited memes or steer the conversation into irrelevant, off topic discussions, golf hotel spain it would be appreciated. Lastly, kindly forgo all civility in your discourse . . . you are, after all, anonymous.
I have an Amex consumer credit card, and it has an Payment Due Date followed by the warning Late Payment Warning: If we do not receive golf hotel spain your Minimum Payment Due by the Payment Due Date listed above, you may have to pay a late fee of up to $##.## and your Purchase APR may be increased to the Penalty golf hotel spain APR of ##.##%.
I ve been concerned about similar things after receiving golf hotel spain a letter from FIA Card Services which services Fidelity Investment cards about issuance of a new card to replace our old one. We ve had a Fidelity cash back card for 8 or 9 years and it has a high enough credit limit to buy a midsize car. We wouldn t use it for that much, but it was nice having it during Katrina when we didn t know how long we d be away or how much it would cost.
The letter wasn t particularly enlightening except that it sound like an Amex card and no preset spending limit was mentioned. We use it a lot for routing purchases, travel and automated billing. Does that mean our card could get rejected for some routine purchase while we re overseas? And then there s your problem about the billing date. I m sure ours will change so they can charge late fees to the many people who get replacement cards. Glad I have a second card with a big limit.
Several years ago when I tried to close out my account with them they kept on billing me a few dollars after each final payment. It was infuriating. Each time I called I couldn t get a definitive answer as to what I had to do, what sum I had to pay, etc. so as to avoid these lingering small balances due. They are unreal.
when I was younger and card shopping remembering AmericanExpress wanted their balance paid in full each month .. I always took it as the bankers convenience card (big purchases) they want their money back soon to reloan it back out to another
Deceptive, yes. We use our Amex cards for convenience, not credit and pay it by the requested date. But they pay us about $500 a year to do so. If they can afford that, you can only image how much someone else is getting ripped off!
I went from this post straight over to my amex account. Another interesting point I use automatic debit for my payment no way to change the payment date on that to anything other than the please pay by date.
Merchant s pay a 5% fee for accepting AMEX cards ( which could be different depending on the country of use). If my friend sees the AMEX logo in a merchant s shop and he finds something that he needs, he then pulls out his AMEX card and asks if he can get a 5% discount by paying golf hotel spain in cash.
I have an old Blue card, it has a due date. Looks like they use due dates for credit, please golf hotel spain pay by for charge. Why? Lost finance charges if folks carrying a balance pay early make it a money losing decision. To see if they went all in with their strategy, it would be interesting to see what is printed on a charge card statement when you carry a balance (they have a number of programs to allow revolve on charge).
AmEx mostly trades golf hotel spain on prestige, the competition has better golf hotel spain rewards golf hotel spain value and comparable service. AmEx is still ahead on prestige and access (reservations, concierge, etc). Venture is a great card for rewards, very simple to get the value, great service (still uses a phone tree, but easy to get an agent and they are competent). Sapphire golf hotel spain has decent golf hotel spain rewards and solid service.
not to defend any sort of fraud or misleading golf hotel spain policies but it seems like a lot of these stories are from years past. my more recent experiences have all been very positive with amex. are they not considered one of the top companies in customer service? i had that impression in my head, but maybe i m off(?) i had a friend who worked for amex and was told that if you call and complain you can literally have them add points to your balance every phone call
I m surprised one of the Amex Senior VP pukes haven t picked up on a neat due date gambit played by Potomac Edison here in rural Maryland: a bill due date that moves from month to month (21 possibilities, I m told, all based on some carefully constructed internal company formula presumably involving chicken entrails).
With the moving due date, some months the bill is suddenly due on the 2nd or 3rd. For retired schmucks like myself, even paying on the first with electronic bill pay, the money somehow doesn t end up as being paid until after the due date (another issue ), which I only realized lately by accident. A check of my bills showed I ve unwittingly paid quite a few late fees over the past year. A few bucks here and there, golf hotel spain but no doubt it s another golf hotel spain extraction for them that adds up handsomely.
golf hotel spain The corporate talking points say the monthly movable due date is somehow related to when they read the meter. That s baloney, given that they are currently under investigation for violating the regulatory rule (remember those?) golf hotel spain limiting them to an estimate every other month. I ve gone four months with estimates, and the monthly bills vary wildly, recently between 12 and 600 dollars, one month to the next.
I work for a large utility in California and likewise our meter reading schedule is staggered across the days of the month. golf hotel spain It depends on weekends, holidays, etc. We have 21 meter reading schedules but because the days of month range from 28 to 31, a particular schedule can t fall on the same day each month.
I am looking at one schedule in particular golf hotel spain an it ranges from the 17th to the 20th of the month. Depending on how you get your bill, paper or electronic, you should have plenty of time before the due date to pay it.
If you want to pay your bill on a date certain, you might looking to automatic payment plans either with your utility or through your bank. Another thing to consider is a balanced payment plan if your utility offers it. It essentially averages your bill for the last, usually, 12 months and you pay that fixed amount. Maybe once a year they adjust it to reflect the latest average. Lowers your bills in the summer and winter and you make up the difference in the spring and the fall. Definitely eases budgeting.
golf hotel spain Perhaps your California utility is different but in our area there is now only the barest theoretical/formulaic connection between meter reading and bills going out. Schedules are made, but actual meter-reading of homes is done only a few months out of the year, while still generating moving target payment golf hotel spain due dates. Combined with the way they help themselves to a three-day float of electronic payments and late fees, it s a nice chunk of change golf hotel spain they pick up on the backs of some of us who get paid on a particular day of every month.
I don t think the burden should be on a customer to get a goddam average of a yearly power bill because a zillion dollar public utility company is either so miserably incompetent or jokingly regulated that it sends homeowners two equally fictitious bills of 12 dollars one month and a 600 dollars the next. And I haven t even brought golf hotel spain up the incessant golf hotel spain outages, which have brought such fame out here to Potomac Ed and PEPCO, although they do bring back memories of traveling in Delhi.
Encountered same issue but I keep my card as I ve had it for decades and always pay on time and may help me get the interest free credit card offers w/points. Currently have an interest free for 21 months card that I use for many, many things and use the points to pay down the bill. I love it that they are paying me for the act of borrowing money from them .. revenge.
AMEX also reserves the right not to post electronic payments for 3 days after receipt, which I found out after paying electronically on the due date, and getting hit with a late fee. I researched switching to a card with my local bank where I have a checking account. Guess what; even with an electronic payment coming from within the same institution, they give themselves 3 days to post the payment.
Also, credit cards issued primarily for business or commercial purposes generally are not governed by the consumer protections in the Truth in Lending Act or the amendments to that act in the Credit Card Accountability, golf hotel spain Respon