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Want to hear a really crazy banking story? Here we go: a few weeks ago I made an honest mistake while paying my bills. Instead of sending my credit card payment to the credit card company, I accidentally transferred the money into my mortgage account. I did not realize the mistake until I suddenly saw a $39 late fee appear in my credit card account (www.mint.com first warned me about it).

The moment I realized my mistake, I made sure that I sent the correct amount into my credit card account and I also contacted the credit card company and asked them to reconsider the late fee. I sent records that indicated that the payment would have arrived on time (had I sent it to the right account) and supported everything with screen-shots of the mortgage account as well as the online banking logs. That, coupled with the fact that I never had a late payment in my eight year history with them, made me think they would reverse the charges. I guess I was wrong, which resulted in the credit card company having one customer less now … (bastards!)

The story does not end here. By sending a payment less than the required monthly payment into my mortgage account, alarm bells went off at the mortgage company. The ignored the fact that the payment came almost 2 weeks before I was supposed to make a payment and they also ignored the fact that an automatic payment was already scheduled (for the full amount) and would arrive on time at the institution. Those ringing the alarm bells *thought*: “Oh oh, he only paid X dollars instead of the Y dollars required. This guy is going to default soon!”

It took about a week and quite a number of phone calls to convince the lender that I’m not going to default on the payment and to initiate the process to reverse the payment.

And to top it all off: here I am, trying to be a good citizen, save some trees, use online banking whenever possible and there is the lender who charges me a $10 fax fee to deal with the reversal of the payment … oh, the irony!