The fun of making car payments.
I’ve had my spiffy current car for several years now and thus my car loan is coming due in February 2007. Because I was silly enough at the time to get talked into getting the extended warranty and not being too aggressive about paying extra towards the loan, I had a nice balloon hurding towards me.
Sure I could hope for a good tax refund and use to pay it off or refinance it..blah blah blah. Instead I decided to try to take the more reasonable approach and just try to put every extra nickel and dime towards it that I could and get it over with. Before I did anything, I stopped by my local credit union that has the loan and made sure I had all my facts correct such as I indeed had the balloon or would need to refinance it, etc. While I was there I made a decent size payment and noticed on my receipt, it said the next payment was due in January. In effect, it was skipping over the November and December payments because in theory I had paid ahead. I asked the teller to make sure that was correct and everything and they assured me it was.
I normally don’t keep the payment amount in this account because I use another bank as my primary account. I just get the money out of the one account and deposit into the other a few days beforehand. I had planned to go ahead do just that and deposit my normal payment anyway and just transfer it just to knock down the payment that much faster. But I got busy that week with just everyday life stuff and figured I could take care of it later.
Imagine my surpise when I got a little notice from my credit union a few days ago. It was an overdraft notice. They cleaned out my checking and savings accounts that had about 2/3rd’s of the payment amount and threw on a overdraft fee for good measure. I didn’t even think about my car payment when I got the notice. I haven’t used my checkcard nor written any checks on this account in ages so I thinking how could I have an overdraft? I’m pretty good (well usually) about this stuff and never had an overdraft before. Apparently even though my next payment was not due until January, their system automatically makes the transfer anyway.
I even got my statement that same day in the mail and it said the next payment was January. So I had a the original teller, the bank statement and a couple reciepts from where I had made loan payments that all said January. The teller was just sorta like thats just how things are and refunded my overdraft fee. I don’t really know what I had been wanting done, but I left feeling unsatisfied. I know there wasn’t much the teller could do besides refund the fee, but I guess its a prinicple at stake thing. If they would have said, you still need to pay November’s payment even with the extra payments, I would have been cool with that. I would have made 100% sure the money was in the account before the due date. Instead I trusted them saying January and got my first overdraft ever.
I deposited the amount for December while I was standing there with the teller to make sure it didn’t happen again. Of course though I happened to check my account tonight while setting up Yodlee and they automatically transferred out the remaining 1/3rd of the payment so I need to go back and deposit more anyway.