@VaBluebird don’t beat yourself up. Sounds like the person who took your car was incompetent and instead of asking what to do, didn’t do anything. It happened to all of us. We expect that employees and the business know what they are doing. It does make us more wary.
It’s not your fault that the dealership is apparently not a good competent dealership. I am sure that GM does not like these sort of things happen. Turns people off from buying a GM vehicle.
I wonder if writing a scathing yelp review (can anyone suggest another site?) would be a good idea.
Also I think that the person might have chuckled because they were annoyed and that you weren’t the first person that this or a similar incompetent situation has happened to.
Autopay means they take the money right out of your account automatically. If there is anything wrong with the bill, even if you are on top of it, it may be sometimes before they correct. If you have autopay they would take the wrong amount out of your account, correct it and then take few weeks to a month to refund the money to you. In OP’s case, if there was autopay, they would have continued to take monthly payment out of her account.
Automatic bank drafts were a problem in the 1980s when many health clubs sprung up around the nation. Few read their contracts carefully and were surprised that when health clubs closed their doors that the contract required/bound the member to continue paying dues for life even though no facilities were available. State Attorneys General stepped in & put a stop to this problem after years of complaints.
There currently exists problems with getting some services & merchants to terminate automatic bank drafts even though the consumer cancelled the service without further obligation. Home security monitoring systems is one that has engaged in such practices. Another industry to watch might be credit monitoring services.
I’m fine with setting up autopay through my own bank - I can control it just by logging into my online banking and see what’s what, change what I need, cancel it, etc.
I do not like to set up autopay that is managed by whoever I’m paying. Too hard to track down to stop when needed, or make changes. I only do it when there is a significant financial incentive to do so - a major discount for autopay, for example, was offered by my old car insurance company.
I’d push for GM to change the credit report and not just give you a letter. You can send in a letter and it is part of your file and it is supposed to be sent out to anyone doing a hard pull of your credit, but guess how often it is, or how often it matters? A creditor pulls the credit score and gets the number, and makes the credit decision; it doesn’t wait for the letter or recalculate the score (if there was even a way to recalculate it).
Don’t beat yourself up over this. Trusting people are happier with their lives and get more trust in return. 99% of the time it works out, and overall you come out ahead. When the dealership misbehaved, you pushed back. That is the exact level of trust that is best.
I help my mother take care of her finances, and I have set up almost everything as autopay so she doesn’t have to worry about it. The one exception is her cable/isp, because when we wanted to close a bank account and open a new one within the same bank years ago they would not stop billing her old account after being instructed to do so, meaning that she incurred a pseudo-overdraft and we couldn’t close the account for a couple of months. It took several phone calls and letters to get them to comply. That is the one recurring bill that she pays by check!
I set up recurring payments with my credit card, never with my bank. That way, if there’s a problem and I dispute it, I still have my money. If it’s autopay, the supplier has my money and I have to fight to get it back. Same reason I never use a debit card. I also get all the credit card protections.
My question is, though, if the car was never “grounded”, why did autopay stop so you “owed” two months’ payments? Did you stop the autopay?
Agree that a credit card is best for autopay. Some will not allow autopay with a credit card. Some will charge a fee, like the co. that manages our property.
I generally avoid autopay because (1) sometimes I want to pay from a different card and (2) I don’t trust companies to keep my card information secure if I were to set it up through them. I just don’t want to leave it on their records.
I had an auto pay set up with my credit card (AmEx) for a cellphone company few years back. Even after I terminated the service they continued to charge my card. When I called AmEx to stop payments they said it is best to work it out with the phone company. I told AmEx I have tried and showed them my termination letter. They finally agreed to stop the recurring charge, but this cell phone company then used another company name to continue to charge me. AmEx did refund me all money, but the only way we stopped it was by changing my AmEx account.
This cell phone company was from abroad and the only way they would provide the service was for me to give them a credit card to charge against.
It’s very difficult for me to not be a controlling micro manager. I can usually tell who isn’t going to follow up, and I’d put car people and mortgage people in that bucket. I swear people only get into house financing and title work because no one else will have them.
My question is, though, if the car was never “grounded”, why did autopay stop so you “owed” two months’ payments? Did you stop the autopay?>>>>>
The autopay DID stop hence we were in arrears for two car payments. I guess it stopped because it was supposed to. It was for 39 months and that had transpired. Since people can and apparently do sometimes extend a lease, I guess they had no way of knowing. All they knew is that they didn’t have “possession” of the vehicle yet.
I feel bad for the OP. It’s easy to say they should have gotten the receipt (and when I return my lease I will be sure to do so) but there are just so many ways for things to go wrong you can’t anticipate all of them.
There’s a saying in engineering that “you can’t design something that is foolproof because fools are so ingenious.” And I think that generalizes. In everyday transactions you can’t anticipate every way something can go wrong.