A couple of weeks ago, I received this stern letter informing me that I'm "not acting in accordance with my cardholder agreement / unpaid bills / unfulfilled obligations / we've cancelled your account / etc." It lists a card number I don't recognize. I call them right away.

Turns out it was the personal VISA I cancelled two years ago. Around six months ago, a transaction went through on the account. Then I didn't pay off the transaction. Of course I didn't: I received no notice, no mail, no phone call, nothing. Why would I, for a card that at that point had been cancelled for 1.5 years? So after months of "defaulting" they freaked out, "cancelled" the card, put a black mark on my credit rating, and sent me that letter.

Meanwhile I have been doing business with the bank, and with my business VISA (same exact companies!) the whole time.

Trying to rectify this issue was a bureaucratic nightmare, where I got shuttled from my bank branch over to VISA and back again. It featured enjoyable conversations that started with things like, "for identity verification purposes, please give me the three digits on the back of your card" (hadn't had it in two years!) and ended with "I'm afraid we can't verify your identity".

What was especially frustrating was I managed to find the paperwork for the card cancellation. I have a signed and dated document that says right on it, "Card destroyed in branch".

After seven or eight interactions with VISA and my bank, I finally managed to get them to resolve the issue. But this all could have been avoided had they simply called me or mailed me a letter. Instead, they claimed that they'd sent statements to the "online portal" which, of course, I did not have access to, since I'd closed the account!

So now I do things one at a time.

E.g. To cancel a card, first move all money (or debts) from acct A to acct B. Go home. Couple of days later, pay any outstanding fees of acct A. Go home. Couple of days later, request cancellation. Inevitably find that something else needs to be done, so do that thing. Go home. Couple of days later....

You get the idea. It sucks big time, but I've found it's better that way, since the probability of error is somewhat lower (and even then it happens!)

As in not worth my time at all to fix some company's internal fuckups versus wait a few years for nobody else to care either.

Before me, the car was owned by my then-partner, who had just moved from the UK to California. I was to sell the car on her behalf, and the registered owner being in a different country is a really suspicious warning sign so we changed the ownership to me so I could sell it more easily.

A week later, I did sell it, and did all the relevant change-of-ownership paperwork again.

Six months later, the police sent me — not my partner, not the new owner — a speeding ticket. It took more than one go for me to prove I didn’t own the car.

Either you didn't or the bank who emitted the card might have a huge PITA due to passing the transaction to a bank account which should not be.

I've never understood the value of "paperless" to the consumer. The benefit to the company is the savings of 3½¢ of postage and mailing expenses. But to the consumer...?

I pay my bills online, but I make sure I still get my statements by mail. I also balance my accounts from those statements each month, and every year I catch one or two errors, and they're almost always in favor of the banks.

Logically, I should be able to do the same thing by looking at my accounts online. But paper statements present the information in a different way than online, often to comply with laws about clear billing and communication. What's on paper sometimes very different from what's on the screen.

In Switzerland we luckily have a system where companies can send their bills directly into your eBanking system so they are all collected there. But if a company doesn't support that, it's much easier to keep the paper bill.

As a business it’s your duty to take care of your recordkeeping, print out the invoices if you so prefer.

Is this a weird american thing? At least here in the UK mortgage interest deductions are only applicable to businesses.

[1] https://www.irs.gov/publications/p936#:~:text=You%20can%20de....

It was, which is why your comment starting with "As a business" was so bizarrely off-topic.

> Is this a weird american thing? At least here in the UK mortgage interest deductions are only applicable to businesses.

Yes. American homeowners can under most circumstances treat their mortage interest payments as tax deductable.

What do you mean by off-topic? Businesses receive utility bills too, and might genuinely be required to keep records of those.

As far as I can tell, barring some very special circumstances, individuals never need to keep such records.

This is blatantly false. Unless paying taxes is a "very special circumstance."

People don't want these records at hand purely for their own amusement, which seems to be the assumption you're operating under here.

> This is blatantly false. Unless paying taxes is a "very special circumstance."

I’ve certainly never needed to pull up my utility bills while paying taxes as a private person.

It really feels like you’re just coming up with stuff, utility bills aren’t normally tax deductible (unless you are a business). There’s no reason you’d ever need them for the taxman any more than your grocery story receipts.

> In what situation will an individual need to supply their utility bills to the taxman during an audit?

The bills would be useful if they expensed some of those payments, deducted them, or whatever. With a record number of people working from home, some portion of those expenses might be tax deductible for some people, some people might receive reimbursements from an employer, etc.

(nobody said anything about an audit)

> I’ve certainly never needed to pull up my utility bills while paying taxes as a private person.

I think we can all agree that if you have never done this, it's unthinkable that anyone would ever do this.

(Way, way upthread jacquesm cited tax audits as a reason for these records to be physically provided, but they're a useful and common means of communication when employing a tax preparer or bookkeeper as well. And back to the original point, this is all even more likely to be true of an "old" person.)

The cost of saving paper records, for an individual, is fairly close to zero, whereas it's a colossal pain in the butt to track down stuff later. Make that mistake once and you won't do it again.

I think you are just repeating original comment here. Regular people in regular situations will never need their old utility bills for tax purposes.

Those choosing to e.g. run a business, pick up various extra responsibilities in doing so. In that case it’s absolutely your own responsibility to maintain good records, and you should print electronic invoices if you so desire.

If you run a business and are using your utility bills as a basis for deductions, you’d have to be stupid to not safely store them (digitally or physically).

Paper invoices should be opt-in, not opt-out. Very few people actually require them.

Under IRS rules, some people who WFH can often deduct part of their home expenses, including utilities.

See IRS Form 8891 line 21, labelled "Utilities"

What did matter in living memory (thus passed down to at least this generation) is that saving utility bills for 7 year can establish credit.

My parents still tell me to do this to this day, since that's how they were able to qualify for a home loan having not participated in the credit system otherwise.

Nowadays most such transactions are reported to a credit bureau, so they are either already on record or (almost?) no banks will care to see them.

My girlfriend just went though this process. She has no credit because she never got a CC and always saved up and paid for stuff like her car in cash. Over the winter she was looking to buy a house (didn't pan out for other reasons), and basically her only option was getting a loan manually underwritten. Part of that process was using a minimum of 2 years worth of bills as a replacement for a credit score. And the only loans available were several points more expensive than she could have gotten if she was able to do things the "normal" way.

Old people are exactly the type of people that would carefully study letters that come in the post. Unlike people my age that would bin anything that comes with the bill thinking it's probably just commercial crap.

But of course this is precisely the reason they do it by email. Dark pattern..

In my case, ISP charges you extra if you decide to keep the paper bills instead going for "eco bill" pdf file send by an email; same goes if you decide to opt-out from company selling your number elsewhere. Last time while getting new contract, 3 different people at local company's office tried to convince me that I can "win some fantastic rewards" if I decide to let them do with my number and personal information whatever they like.

I did opt-outed but they manage to sell all my numbers present on account elsewhere and somehow every month around time when bills arrive, I'm getting bombarded by robocalls - either about photovoltaics or central heating replacements. They claim they didn't do it but they can't explain why newly added number that has all opt-outs receives calls at the same time with the rest.

I'm old enough to remember when banks and other companies would charge extra for the privilege of paying online.

Probably what happened here was that a mid-level manager had a goal for 2021 to reduce paper billing by X percent. And came up with this as a quick trick to do it. Departments externalise negative effects to other parts of the company all the time. What they care about is their own goals and looking good to higher management. Not the interests of the company as a whole. This will only change when something causes a ruckus and top management finds out about it.

Also, the company is not really losing anything, the customer will sign up again, has to pay reconnection fees and will probably be forced to e-bill "because paper billing is no longer available for new customers". Triple win for the company really.

Of course the customer can move to another company but they'll probably want to keep their number and the whole portability rigmarole is much too difficult for this type of customer.

Then there is the group who are still going to insist on/need paper bills, but use technology enough to catch the email about changing and use the opt out process.

I wouldn't say it's a dastardly plot to kick my elderly neighbour off their service, but simple disregard that people like her that would fall through the cracks while they're trying to save money with the first group.

That's so horribly absurd - have just left a utility company, we would send you paper notices leading up to shut-off regardless of paperless opt-in status. Having a customer without water was considered far worse than wasting a little extra litter in the grand-scheme.

When you have to pay the postage and printing costs, it is far less attractive to throw out 10.000 scam mailings, because the ROI is quite likely negative. Edit: whereas with email, you proably need just one of the 10.000 to bite in order to break-even.

Whereas the phone company (or any legit business) can easily carry those extra €0.40 or so for each bill. They can even simply forward the costs to the customer.

Mailing invoices by snail-mail is a practical anti-scam measure, the more I think about it.

Scammers printing scam letters can just as easily print fake postmarks.

> When you have to pay the postage and printing costs, it is far less attractive to throw out 10.000 scam mailings, because the ROI is quite likely negative

Try to do think about the math here. What kind of scam mail are you sending to reach such bad ROI? Let’s imagine these are fake utility bills for around 50 euros and total cost to the scammer is 1 euro per letter. Your success rate would have to be incredibly bad for the ROI to be negative.

Now, target tenants of rental properties instead and tell them they need to pay their rent to a new account. Profits go up 10-100x, costs stay the same.

> Scammers printing scam letters can just as easily print fake postmarks.

-While that is true, it is impractical on at least a couple of levels:

a) You need to get that fake mail into the postal system, somehow - and do so in a way which escapes attention.

b) (The worrying bit, if you're a scammer) - You've just gone from attempted fraud (sending out scam emails) to defrauding the postal service of whatever country you try to pull this one off in; the authorities are quite likely to take a dim view of your efforts.

You pay some guy to drive around and stuff your envelopes into various post boxes 500-1000 at a time.

Or just find an insider at the postal service of your choice, crime forums are full of people offering this.

If you’re capable of accepting payments for fake bills, you already have people walking into banks with fake IDs to open accounts. Sending out letters is significantly less complex.

> b) (The worrying bit, if you're a scammer) - You've just gone from attempted fraud (sending out scam emails) to defrauding the postal service of whatever country you try to pull this one off in; the authorities are quite likely to take a dim view of your efforts.

Probably not, considering the amount of crimes involved in accepting money transfers to a drop account created with fake documents and the subsequent money laundering.

Defrauding the postal service is small potatoes.

In my country this is a real thing: fake invoices (in the sense that they are real invoices, but for fake services) mailed to companies hoping a few companies automatically pay them. They are called Spookfacturen (ghost invoices). And if ever we switch to full digital invoicing, this'll grow much bigger. Because now the costs of these scams are big.

Name and shame. The rest of us can't help people look out for scams if you're not going to tell us what to look out for.

I'm only 59, but without my paper bills, I've missed a few deadlines for credit card. I used to look for the bill in the mail as my reminder to pay it for the month.

The article was talking about a 78 year old, and you're 59, but this is a problem that will not go away if it isn't addressed.

One day even Zoomers will be confused by needing to pay their bills using their wet-wired neurolink to an orbiting drone, and they'll be unable to because their tiny house doesn't have a v9000 laser alignment defragmenter. And then the bank will send a Terminator to their doorstep to deactivate their iLegs for non-payment.

Dealing with real people, that you have a prior relationship with, in paper (or parchment, or papyrus, or clay) has a robust tradition that everybody can understand or at the very least deal with. I don't mind technological solutions, but they had better be as robust as being able to call up Dave and having him work out the problem.

I'm 29 and the same thing also happened to me. It's also so annoying that every time you have to log in into their website to download the bill... They could at least email it to you.

I worked in a related field and the cost of this is really not the postage. Your billing system needs to support sending paper bills, everywhere you have customer communication you'll need to add the paper way, the format is different, you still need a way for your billing system to actually send those letters, you accounting needs to check for it etc etc. Also, every time you discuss a change in your systems, you need to consider the edge case of these 12 customers.

The letters themselves are cheap, supporting paper in every system you have is the real cost. I agree that they should have handled this better, no questions asked, but it's not like we're just talking about pennies in postage.

I try to get all bills on paper. Then I just write the due date on the envelope when it arrives and keep them sorted by due date in a neat pile on my desk. Impossible to miss a due date that way.

I've been of that age since I was 18

No consumers will eat the cost of a bunch of boomers who want to keep using cheques.

And here's what will happen: the non boomer consumers will choose a cheaper bank. So unless the government wants to pick up the bill any sensible company will tell those senior citizens to get with the times.

It pays to have empathy to all cross sections of society, not just the ones that are the most visible. :)

All of this just because our society is to stupid?

Old people are not stupid, they are just old. They should be able to either teach themselves or being teached.

Our society should focus on helping them to navigate the current world and not try to keep things like checks alive.

And I'm pissed about this though because I believe it's a mindset thing which needs to change to be able to act on real problems like climate change.

When I talk to old people about solar energy holy shit do they care more about how those Solarpanel look at buildings then the benefit of them.

If we don't help those people they are being limited by society one way or the other anyway!

No you don't. You can scan them in many cases these days, or mail them in. Can also deposit in ATMs.

I cash checks all the time and haven't physically been to my bank in over 20 years, as the nearest branch is ~3000 miles away.

The government invents money by the billions die these guys. The least they can do is provide some service.

I used swipe typing and I was a little bit off and didn't notice it. Oops. But I think it's pretty clear from the sentence what I intended.

Gov creates money not the banks. They do have operational costs.

And it is not one person who needs to accept checks, every branch has to support this.

I have not been to a bank for the last 10 years. They are obsolete. And those buildings are expensive and they have to be able to compete with online banks. It's not even an option for them to just keep those buildings.

PS I was just at my bank and I'm not even super old :)

Why I was at the bank? I had to cancel a credit card I never used, and had to show my latest ID.. Here in Europe banks are supposed to validate ID regularly now which is a real pain in the **. I don't get why either, it's not like I change identity very often :) It's just more distrust from the government I think.

No I didn't go there to withdraw money or to pay bills. Though it can still be done. In fact for some government transactions, like getting a new ID, it has to be done. You have to go to the bank with a government form, pay your 20 euros into the government account, and the bank stamps the form as proof that you did it. Then you take that to the police and they issue a new ID.

This is also in Spain by the way (like the article).

Yeah I hate this process too. But I like that old people can still do things the way they understand.

Very weird but unlucky you I guess :)

Your ageism is showing. Hopefully you're never in a management position in an American company, because that attitude will get you fired for violating federal discrimination laws.

Moreover, just wait. You'll get your turn.

I work in technology enough to distrust it greatly. I had a multi-week saga one time because I used an electronic pdf signature instead of printing it out. I still get people freaked out when my resume is digitally signed in acrobat.

I will stick to my dead tree banking.