I made a stupid mistake this month. I forgot to pay a credit card bill.
How I forgot, I don’t know. I have two Chase credit cards. They are linked to one account, so I login once and can see both cards. Somehow, I set up the electronic payment for one and not for the other.
Thankfully, I realized this the day after the payment was due when I saw the $25 late fee hit.
I’m also going to be hit with a day of interest for that late payment too, and that’s gonna hurt.
It was a stupid mistake, and I’m going to be extra careful about it from now on. I’m just going to suck up the fees and move on and make sure to be on top of my bills. I’m sure of what happened – the bill came while I was out of town during the holidays, and it just got set aside rather than getting paid immediately.
At least it was just a credit card and not something bigger, like a utility bill. No need to mess with not having heat during the winter!
Megan is a 40-something government employee in the Washington, DC area. She got interested in Personal Finance when she got out of college and realized that her paycheck wasn’t going to go as far as she had hoped. Since starting this blog, she has managed to buy a house and make a solid start on her retirement goals, and hopes to help others do the same. Here is her story:
In 2007, I was a gainfully employed 20-something with no debt but not a lot of knowledge about personal finance. It was a co-worker’s comment about Roth IRAs that sent me to the internet, searching for information. It was then that I realized that I really didn’t know a whole lot about personal finance and that my current financial situation was due a lot to inherent frugal tendencies, generous family members, a fear of debt, and good luck. While that was working for me, clearly I needed a better plan.
While I had no debt, I was also pretty much living paycheck to paycheck and not worrying about going over budget (I say this as if I had a real budget) because I had an emergency fund set aside to cover any overages.
Except that’s not what an emergency fund is for.
So I did a lot of research, read a lot of blogs, and decided that I needed a plan. I needed to budget. I needed to know what I was spending my money on. I needed to prepare for the future.
I decided to create a blog not only to make myself accountable to others but also to share the knowledge that I gained along the way. I’ve learned so much from my fellow bloggers, and I hope that my readers can find something useful in what I have to share as well.
If you always pay your bills on time, you might be able to get that waived for you.
I use 4 credit cards depending on the store I’m at… always pay them off but I’m scared one month I’ll forget too.
As bogofdebt said, maybe you can call and ask for it to be waived?
I hate when that happens. For one of my credit cards, I can set up, up to 10 payments and then I have set up another 10. You guess it after the 10th payment I get nailed with the fee you mentioned above. I ALWAYS screw it up.