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Everybody’s million-dollar-question is “How do you make money on Twitter?” Well, I managed to “make” over $60 this month, thanks to one simple tweet. Here’s the backstory (this also answers the OTHER million-dollar-question, “What’s the point of being on Twitter, anyway?”):
I keep my checking account with ING Direct right now, and I love it. While I am moving to a joint checking account with my lovely fiancé, my ING account is all mine and currently, I still pay some bills out of it while I make the switch. But for a period of time, I also had my “emergency” checking account with Guaranty Bank.
The reason for this was simple: ING has no branches, and in case I need to make an emergency transaction, I can deposit cash or checks immediately into my Guaranty Bank checking account, and then pay a bill if I need to. Except the big issue was that, once in a while, I would accidentally pay a bill out of my Guaranty Bank account while all my money was in my ING account.
For example, a few months ago, I accidentally drew my Bank of America credit card payment out of my Guaranty Bank account without realizing it. So, the money for the payment was sitting in my ING account, and Guaranty Bank winds up paying the bill and then charging me $37. That’s fair. It was my mistake.
But I accidentally did it again last month. This time, disaster struck. Guaranty Bank decided not to pay the bill. So when the charge came through, they took it, charged me $37 for a returned check fee, and then sent it back. Bank of America, for some reason, decided to try sending it through again. So Guaranty Bank took it, charged me $37, and sent it back again. Guaranty Bank does not have any type of email alerts or anything – they send a letter. That’s right, a snail mail letter. They might as well have given it along with a flask to a guy on a horse. By the time I got this letter, I was well over $70 in the hole and my credit card payment had not been paid.
Now, at this point, it is my fault. I’m not trying to skirt responsibility here. However, I do take issue with the idea that the bank could suddenly change its mind about how it handles these issues and then literally notify me days after the fact that this happened. If I have ever overdrawn on my ING account, an email pops up on my phone before I get my keys out in the parking lot.
So I closed the account with Guaranty Bank. I was done. If I needed another brick-and-mortar bank, I’d find a different one. I paid off the debt and closed the account after five years (and I used to work there!), because they took away fee reversal privileges from the tellers since I left there. I called Bank of America and the woman said she didn’t know why the payment was sent through twice, and that a cash advance was going to be taken off the credit card to pay the account and I would have to pay the associated fees, along with the late fees and the returned check fees. I asked if I could make the payment over the phone right then and there – after all, I still had the money! She said I could not, because this process had already begun and there was nothing we could do. It didn’t make sense to me, but I accepted it because that’s apparently what they do.
I waited, and the next week, I noticed all the fees hit, but the cash advance was not processed, and I had a double payment due the next month. I called back, and the next woman told me she didn’t know why I was told this, but they don’t take cash advances to pay accounts. She didn’t understand why I wasn’t allowed to make a payment over the phone – and that money was gone at this point. She also reiterated that the payment should not have been attempted twice. She then told me she would reverse the late fees and the returned check fees, and I would owe about $130, much less than the nearly $200 payment I originally owed. I thanked her and went on my way.
The following week, I saw that the fees were reversed but the payment was still almost $200. I called and complained, saying I had already altered my budget twice now for wrong information. The gentleman said there was nothing he could do. I hung up. Angry, I called back once more and spoke to another woman. She attempted to reverse another $40 (which she did), but it did not affect the payment due. She said she couldn’t do anything about it.
Furious at this point, I went to Twitter. I was shocked to see @BofA_Help on Twitter. I decided to publicly send them a message:
Like I said, I was angry. I wasn’t really expecting anything to come out of it, it just was my way of venting.
Next thing I know, I get a response asking for my contact information. I then get a phone call and I explain my situation to the woman. She calls me back later and says she doesn’t know how I got all this incorrect information, and she’s clearly not thrilled about doing this, but she tells me to pay the $130 and then notify her and she will adjust the rest of the payment.
I did. And it was taken care of within a day.
Now, I’m still not exactly a big fan of Bank of America. I think they need better training for their reps, as I received so much wrong information in such a short period of time that severely impacted my budget. However, I have to give them props for being so responsive and having a dedicated team on Twitter to help their customers.
It doesn’t stop there – there are plenty of companies on Twitter, and sometimes it’s easier to get access to REAL people by going the Twitter route. If nothing else, you should be on Twitter to have your voice heard by the customer service reps for the big companies that tend to treat you like dirt. That one tweet above was a throwaway thought, but it wound up finally getting me what I was told I was going to get. All my fees were reversed and I still paid the money that I rightfully owed.
Thanks, @BofA_help.
Do you have any cool Twitter stories to share? Drop them in the comments, we’d love to hear them!
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Like everybody else, today I talk about the Leno-Conan-NBC feud, past television classics, and how patience plays out in your life. If you don’t see the “play” button above the picture, click on the post title and you will see it. Enjoy, and as always, please feel free to leave some feedback!
As I lay in bed, my thoughts turn to getting mugged. Because that’s how my brain works.
Think about this: imagine you are walking down the street carrying $65 in your pocket. A guy walks up to you with a gun and threatens to shoot you on the spot if you don’t give him your money. A chill runs down your spine and you slowly reach into your pocket, pull out your $65, and hand it to him. He runs off.
The next month, you are depressed because of the $65 loss from last month. But you’re carrying $67 now. The exact same guy comes up to you, pulls the gun, and you hand it to him.
Next month, you’re carrying $70. Now the guy just walks up to you and you hand it to him without thinking.
And the next month. And the next month.
This is the story of what I do every month. I have a Visa bill that is sky-high and an interest rate to match. Every month, I get charged about $65 or so on that balance. Oh, and I have another credit card too, with an even higher balance. Every month, I have to kiss well over $100 in interest alone on these accounts, just because I’m carrying a balance on them.
I’ve heard people say that using a credit card is safer because you wouldn’t want to be robbed when you’re carrying cash, but it looks to me like you’re getting robbed worse and more often with the credit card companies. And the worst part about it is, after a while, you don’t even notice it. You just accept it and go on with your life.
Is that sad or what?
You’re driving along the road one day, not a care in the world. You’re on your way to work or something, I don’t know. You see a big rock or a board in the road, and you don’t really care, so you hit it anyway. All of a sudden, *BOOM*! You blow out a tire.
You limp the car over to the side of the road, and you get out and look at the car. You stare at it blankly, and immediately call up your brother. “There’s something wrong with the car, it’s not driving right.”
Your brother arrives, sees the flat tire and says, “How did this happen?” You shrug your shoulders and you have no answer. As he proceeds to pull your jack and wrench out of your trunk, you wander around and not pay attention to what he does. He tries to tell you that you shouldn’t have hit that board in the road, but you weren’t really listening anyway. You thank him profusely, promise it’ll never happen again, and then you go speeding off in your car. Your brother knows you’ll be calling him again for another tire change in a few months.
Sounds ridiculous, right? That kind of person shouldn’t even own a car! Yet that’s what so many people do with their computers.
Computers are not complicated. Sure, you open them up and all the flashing lights and doodads look impressive, but for day-to-day use, it’s not that big of a deal. Simple basic maintenance will help prevent so many problems and you won’t have to call your “family IT guy” for help every other week. When you make a big purchase, like a car or a computer, you need to understand how to care for it and simple, basic maintenance. Just like knowing how to drive carefully and change a tire, you need to know how to use a computer without crashing it all the time or without being able to fix basic problems with it.
I can’t wait for the Mac fanboys to start writing “Just get a Mac! Mine JUST WORKS! No maintenance needed!” But it goes deeper than that. Sure, Macs are fine. They’re slick-looking, and they run really well. But it’s like buying a $40,000 car: it’s great if you have the money to do that, but it’s wildly unnecessary if you’re on any sort of budget, and you don’t really want to listen to the people telling you to buy that car when you don’t have the money to do so right now.
Pictured: A Mac.
Plus, it’s not the idea that Macs are inferior to PCs or anything. It’s the willful ignorance that people revel in when they buy a Mac. They run up their credit cards and dig themselves into holes just to buy a $1500 computer so that they can tell people that they don’t have to run an antivirus program. How ludicrous is that?!? I paid about $500 for my laptop and I’ve run this thing into the ground, but it works even better now than the day I bought it. So how do you learn the basics without spending all your freaking time being a nerd? Here are a few tips:
It could be naked pictures of Megan Fox, the secret to making a crapload of money really fast, or the “funniest picture of two monkeys doing it you’ll ever see!!!!” – if it’s from a stranger, it will screw up your computer. Period.
Keep dreaming.
Protect yourself. You wouldn’t drive around a car without a seat belt on, right? (Or you shouldn’t, anyway!) I don’t care if it’s AVG, Avast, or my personal favorite, Panda Cloud Antivirus. Just install SOMEthing. It’ll fight off most bad stuff. Is that easy enough to understand? This trouble alone is apparently worth $1,000 to some people.
CCleaner is an easy-to-use, two-clicks-and-your-computer’s-clean application that will wipe all the gunk out of your computer system when you run it. If you know how to check your email, this is even easier than that. Click, click, and it’s clean. Close the program and run it again in a week. Takes 30 seconds.
Before you go crying to your brother, try searching quick for a solution. If your Internet Explorer is running slow, go to Google and type “Internet Explorer is running slow”. If your screen goes black when you play Solitaire, type in “screen goes black when playing Solitaire”. You get the idea? There will be web sites and even a few forums where people post solutions to these problems, and most of the time, it’s with dead-simple instruction for newbies. That’s how you learn, people.
If you don’t know how to avoid crap in the road and not blow out your tires, and you don’t know how to change a tire, I don’t want you driving around in a car. If you don’t know how to avoid downloading viruses to your computer and you don’t know how to perform basic maintenance on it to keep it running, I don’t want you owning a computer. There. I said it.
Today’s podcast talks about failure. I’ve failed in a lot of business ventures in the past year, and I want to tell you how I plan to respond to it, and how you can handle the failures in your life.
If you can’t see the “play” button at the top of this post, click on the post title and you should see it. Comments are always welcome! Thanks!
