<p>It was unethical (illegal?) for the realtor to give your contact information. It is unethical for you not to pay for all the gas you used. How to pay is the question. If you just send the money to the gas company, won’t they just credit it to your current or future charges? You have concerns, perhaps legitimate, about dealing with your sellers. I think you have to contact the gas company, explain the situation, and ask how to best work it out. It is a hassle. Welcome to grown up, bill paying, house owning life. If you can’t take care of this directly with the gas company, maybe you can use the realtor as an intermediary? </p>
<p>“I am not against paying the $80 if we didn’t pay for our own gas, but it seems to me the seller should be getting a refund from the gas company, not from us, and that we should be paying the gas company, not them. This whole thing makes me so uncomfortable.”</p>
<p>You do NOT need a lawyer and you do NOT owe them this money. It is between them and the gas company and once they get their relationship with the gas company clarified with the gas company, the gas company will then come to you for payment. If you send the sellers money (again) and they then make it clear to the gas company that they stopped owning at whatever your closing date was, you could end up on the hook w the gas company if the seller decides to just pocket the money you sent in good faith.</p>
<p>It is admirable that you want to do the “right thing” but know that that opportunity will find its way to you if the seller follows the correct process w the gas company. If you pay the seller directly, you potentially complicate things and expose yourself to being taken advantage of. BTW, the realtor should not have been involved at this stage and should not have given anyone’s contact info out. It would have been provided by the parties at closing.</p>
<p>Let the seller know you will pay the gas company directly once the seller establishes with the gas company the correct date service should have been terminated. I am sure you will need to let gas company know that yourself; it won’t be enough coming from the seller.</p>
<p>alh, while I am not suggesting the original poster do so, it would NOT be unethical for her to not pay for this gas as we are responsible for our own actions and the seller neglected to have the service terminated accurately. It is a moot point since the buyer is making a real effort to back pay, but if they were to go to court, no judge would make the buyer pay; it would be the seller’s burden.</p>
What are you talking about? The feds do not get involved in small claims collections (nor typically the sheriff or other authority) If you win a judgment in small claims court it is your responsibility to try to collect. You can file a FiFa [Fieri</a> facias - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia](<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fieri_facias]Fieri”>Fieri facias - Wikipedia) and try to garnish their wages or bank account, if you have the banking info (though in these situations they person who skips out on the judgment usually also closes their account and opens a new one).</p>
<p>Doesn’t matter if your friends or relatives or cousins or whoever have been though this process. The small claims court awards a judgement, but they don’t send out a posse to get the deadbeat to pay up. Thats a bunch of nonsense.</p>
<p>** (Giving that as an example-- point is the authorities are not going to do anything unless the person skips bond or something in a criminal matter-- NOT small claims court)</p>
<p>^^Just what I was thinking. I’ve won twice, easily, against tenants. Meaningless. They didn’t care about whether they paid or their credit. There’s a judgment, so what?</p>
<p>When people are referring to auto pay it is when companies automatically take payments from your bank account. Online payment is when you use the internet to make a payment, whether it is from your online banking or from a company’s website. I do all online payment, but I do not do auto pay because they don’t need my permission to take money from my acct.</p>
<p>This little $80 dollar problem the PREVIOUS OWNER has is getting pretty busy. Now the feds, the sheriff, small claims court, the gas company, the bank, possees, social security adminstration, the realtor, and lawyers are involved… and wage garnishment and judgments and bonds are being talked about.</p>
<p>I’ve bought and sold a lot of houses. I’ve made mistakes and forgotten to cut off/turn on the gas/electricity/water… In EVERY case, the utility has taken care of getting the error corrected. I have no idea why the previous owners are coming after you for $80, but they are wrong to do so. It’s their error. They need to fix it. Call their real estate agent (since yours is an idiot) and tell the agent to call them off. It’s harassment, pure and simple.</p>
<p>Nice summary, dmd77. The discussion has taken lots of twitst and turns, tangential to the original discussion. Like that NEVER happens on CC, LOL.</p>