Last year, I rented a car while mine was off having damage fixed. The danger in renting a car and then going about your normal routine is that you may forget that the rental car doesn’t have a toll transponder, and breeze through the EZPass lane as you normally would. I knew what was coming: a $25 bill for my 60¢ toll. Reader Allen didn’t know, and had to pay $35 for a $1 toll. Let these experiences serve as cautionary tales. [More]
convenience fees
Why Paying Your College Tuition With A Credit Card Is A Bad Idea
By 10.7.14
A few weeks ago, we listed for you a wide variety of creative and mundane ways to pay for college. What we didn’t get into were ways to get money from your bank account to the school’s hands. While you might put every other expense on a credit card and pay it off every month, there are reasons why it can be a terrible idea to put your tuition on a credit card. [More]
Verizon Caves, Pulls Plug On $2 Convenience Fee
By 12.30.11
Well that was fast. Only hours after publicly stating it wouldn’t back off from charging a $2/month fee to customers who paid online or by phone with a debit/credit card, Verizon Wireless has pulled a complete 180 and decided to nix the fee completely. [More]
FCC Voices Concern Over Verizon Wireless Fee
By 12.30.11
Someone at the FCC must be a Verizon Wireless customer. The agency has just announced that it will look into the nation’s largest cell phone service provider’s plan to charge a $2/month fee to customers who don’t enroll in auto-pay or pay directly from their bank accounts. [More]
Verizon Wireless Adds $2 'Convenience' Fee To Make Your Life More Inconvenient
By 12.29.11
If you found that using your credit/debit card to pay your Verizon Wireless bill online or by phone every month was just too darned inconvenient, the folks at VZW have some really, really wonderful news. They will now be charging a $2 convenience fee for the privilege of giving them your money! Oh wait… that sucks. [More]
More On Minimum Purchases, Surcharges, And Other Credit Card Merchant Agreement Violations, From The Companies Themselves
By 7.30.08
We’ve posted a lot of stories of businesses requiring customers who pay with a credit card to make minimum purchases, or pay a surcharge, or show ID. And as we’ve repeatedly said, the businesses’ merchant agreements with the credit card companies forbids these practices. A reader wrote in to argue that this might not be true, as many businesses contract with third-party credit card processors, and are not bound by the merchant agreement. So we did some investigating.
