Last week my wife had an aggravating experience that you should know about:
First, she received a letter from The Huntington National Bank saying she had missed a payment on her car loan and owed a $10 late fee. Also, the bank said it was required to report it to the credit rating agencies.
And this was her last auto-pay payment on the car she bought five years ago.
“One reason I decided to finance it was that I had a surprisingly low credit rating,” she said, “simply because I have never taken out a loan; I don’t pay rent, because we own our house outright; and they have nothing to base my credit rating on.”
Our financial advisor told her it would be beneficial to get the loan and make all the payments on time, because that would raise her credit rating.
So my wife set up auto-pay to make sure she paid Huntington $518.08 every month on time.
Not to have it go through this last time was inexplicable. So she called Huntington to ask why auto-pay hadn’t worked.
The bank rep said, “That’s what we always do, because when it’s your last payment there is no telling in advance how much you’ll owe at the very end. It’ll probably be something different from the original calculated monthly payment. So we never deduct the last payment.”
“But I didn’t get any notice of that,” she told the woman, asking her to take the last payment…
