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Comment by Macha | Hacker News Reader

I've had to assist an elderly neighbour after her phone company cut off her phone service.

Why?

The way she had paid for it for the preceding 40 years was she would get the paper bill in mail, and then go down to the post office and organise payment using the details in that paper bill.

They switched her over to paperless billing with an email that they've done so but you can opt out.

She either did not understand the implications of this or missed the email, and is of the age where she would not remember when exactly she had last paid which bill. So without a paper bill to remind her, and her payment method being via the post office rather than the utility provider having billing details on record, she ended up not paying 3 months of bills and being cut off.

It's not like they've offered this option to new customers for at least 15 years. So stuff like this it feels like they should just eat the cost of 12 letters per year until the remaining people availing of it age out.

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I recently endured a Kafka-esque nightmare with my bank. I had this personal VISA card for several years but I rarely used it because I also have a Mastercard that I prefer. Anyway, two years ago when I started my current venture I opened a business bank account with my preferred bank for business banking (same bank I had the personal VISA through), so I applied for a business VISA. At the same time, I told them I wanted to cancel my personal VISA, because I don't need three credit cards. No problem, did the paperwork and left the card at the bank.

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!

What happened to you is clearly not your fault, but after having similar issues with big institutions, I've realized that doing more than one "important" operation on a " big business/bank" account is always finicky.

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!)

It's sort of funny that software engineers spend so much time thinking about the nuances of making sure that things occur in the right order on the scale of milliseconds while maintaining invariants in all sorts of exotic distributed NoSQL systems that don't guarantee strong consistency... and meanwhile many of the most important things we do on computers use standard centralized relational DBs but take several business days to process and get screwed up if you don't wait long enough for them to resolve properly.

I’m starting to adopt a similar idea about non-urgent healthcare. I have found healthcare providers can not communicate costs when they have more than one procedure.

Same thing happened with me and MBNA, they just never sent me physical bill OR an email for a transaction I had no idea occurred (because I had canceled the card!) and then put a mark on my credit report because I had a debt that was not resolved. All of this for... $7

It's a shame you can't get criminal charges against banks in cases like this. For people who aren't scrupulous about saving copies of transaction receipts, and memorializing transactions, you can be in real trouble for a long time!

Right? They can do incredible damage to people, but have no consequences for it - take OP: if they were applying for a mortgage at the same time that black mark on their credit rating wouldn’t have caused the mortgage to fall through.

I had a couple of minor bills like this with companies I barely ever deal with, and at one point I bothered to look at my credit rating. The material impact of a few unpaid items was to drop the bullshit FICO rating from 840 to 810.

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.

I had a similar thing a few years ago only with the police and a speeding ticket.

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.

> since I'd closed the account!

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.

Which bank?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYQaYJxCltY

I think paper invoices should continue to be the way that this is handled unless otherwise requested, if only because you are - where I live - supposed to be able to prove this sort of thing for many years to the tax man. All these electronic records can disappear into thin air without you even realizing it has happened and good luck on your tax audit 7 years into the future.

All these electronic records can disappear into thin air without you even realizing it has happened and good luck on your tax audit 7 years into the future.

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.

Yeah the paperless system is horrible unless you are a person that strictly organizes things. There are so many different places where you have to go to collect your digital bills, and sometimes you just end up forgetting.

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.

Why would you ever need to prove this kind of transactions to the tax man as an individual?

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

The first mortgage bill of the year typically includes tax statements for the prior year. Etc.

I thought this thread was about utility bills, but okay, I’ll play along with your incredibly specific example.

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

You can deduct home mortgage interest [1]. Another way in which homeownership and to an extent NIMBYism is subsidized in the tax code and by government policies.

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

> I thought this thread was about utility bills

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.

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

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.

> 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.

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

> 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.

Wow, you really created an account to make that comment?

> 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.

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

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"

As far as I can tell this exclusively applies to self-employed people, i.e. someone running a business from their home.

Post 2017 it does, only people who are 1099, so it includes many software engineers who are contractors. Before 2017, it included employees too. So, some plain-old w2 employees still have utility bills lying around subject to audit.

There is a federal mortgage interest tax deduction, and there may also be a state level deduction depending on the state since they each have different tax laws. On the federal level, 90%+ people do not use the mortgage interest tax deduction because doing so would cost them more than not using it.

It is an American thing, and it's often more than just mortgage interest, as it is standard to have our property taxes and insurance(s) escrowed through the mortgage as well.

But the mortgage giver already sends those to the tax authority. How else do you think they have all your mortgage data pre-filled when you file your taxes ?

In the United States, even paying for the highest level of TurboTax does not get me the ability to have my mortgage information prefilled. Still have to enter the information that Chase sent to the IRS on an IRS form in manually on my form. Tax preparation in the US is truly the wild west.

I wish my tax authority did that... on any of my tax returns.

It's how it is done in Scandinavia and most of Europe. I only have to add a few numbers because I have some small investments offshore, otherwise everything including investments in mutual funds is already itemized.

It's an American urban legend passed down from a time it may or may not have mattered.

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.

Huh? Paid utility bills don't help to establish a credit history on your credit report even today.

It doesn't, but multiple years worth of rent/utility bills can be used as a substitute so long as you are willing to jump through a couple extra hoops and pay a little bit more in interest for the privilege.

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.

Yes, that was my point. If you can get the lender to look at your history, it matters, like anything else. But those transactions do not establish a credit history associated with your credit score.

Doing that by email is a real dick move. They should send a letter with the last bill. And do it opt in of course.

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..

> And do it opt in of course.

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.

In my case, ISP charges you extra if you decide to keep the paper bills

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

Oh they still do. Some of them, anyway. Like my electric utility.

It's probably still cheaper to pay that small extra fee. I am usually an organized person but in the last 4-5 years I still forgot to download my credit card bill 4 times, which caused a 30$ late fee every time.

Precisely the reason? Is it to the phone company's advantage to lose a paying customer?

Don't think of the company as one single highly aligned entity.

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.

I would say most people, even most people still using paper billing in 2022, have a billing method set up (be it CC charges, direct debits or standing order) that would allow their bill to continue to be paid for their main utilities in the absence of receiving a paper bill. It's these people who the companies would rather cajole onto paperless billing.

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.

> She either did not understand the implications of this or missed the email, and is of the age where she would not remember when exactly she had last paid which bill. So without a paper bill to remind her, and her payment method being via the post office rather than the utility provider having billing details on record, she ended up not paying 3 months of bills and being cut off.

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.

Ironically, my dad sometimes receives random scam bills via email from [insert well-known company name here] and I tell him to instantly delete them.

Makes me think, that, indeed, the extra friction of paper mail, holds some scammers at bay.

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.

Also it’s hard to send letters internationally while making them look domestic.

This is a bizarre idea.

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.

> This is a bizarre idea.

> 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.

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

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.

You're probably right, but I think a bigger factor is that if someone pays by mail, a scammer will find it difficult to cash a check that's made out to the utility company.

I believe the only country in the world to still use cheques are the US. In Europe, at least, we get an invoice with payment details printed on it or an occasional giro form. Both are probably easier to scam than cheques.

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.

scam bills via email from [insert well-known company name here]

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 read it as the bills aren't actually from [well known company] but sent out by scammers knowing many people will get real bills from [well known company] and some may mistake the scammer's bills for real ones and pay the scammer.

It might be a particular company's name, but it's not that company. It's a scammer using the company's name. There's absolutely no point in naming them.

My bank (Bank of America) has this "dark pattern" where they try to switch you to paperless statements and billing every time you log into their website. Each time you log in you get a popup about paperless billing. If you click the "default" big button, you've opted in to it. You have to look for a little tiny text link to keep getting paper bills.

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.

>I'm only 59, but without my paper bills, I've missed a few deadlines for credit card.

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 only 59, but without my paper bills, I've missed a few deadlines for credit card.

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.

> So stuff like this it feels like they should just eat the cost of 12 letters per year until the remaining people availing of it age out.

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.

Paperless billing is such a nuisance. I get too much email and I'm far too busy, so anything in the email queue is quickly forgotten. I don't have the time or energy to be re-reviewing emails every day for bills that might be coming due soon.

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.

> is of the age where she would not remember when exactly she had last paid which bill

I've been of that age since I was 18

Same thing happened to my Dad with AT&T

"they should just eat the cost"

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.

Checks are awesome - I use them all the time and I'm at least a third of the age of the elderly. Accessibility is huge to think about especially with "requireables" like the banks, and so it's just good practice and the right thing to do to think about the elderly and edge cases for folks who don't do email/smartphones.

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

Checks are ridiculously stupid. They are not save, expensive and you need to go to the bank to cash them in.

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!

> you need to go to the bank to cash them in

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.

but excessive empathy is crippling for future progress. this is literally the root issue in the US system - way too much consideration for special interests. look at housing as an example.

As if the cost for those few bills make a dent in a bank's operating costs.

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

'die these guys' should have read 'for' these guys.

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.

This is very unlogical:

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.

Of course banks create money. You don't think that they hold enough money to pay all their creditors at once do you? Never heard of fractional reserve banking? See https://www.investopedia.com/terms/f/fractionalreservebankin...

As I understand it, the new money that's 'created'(not even minted as paper money is pretty niche now) by the government is given to the banks to invest.

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

But for what?

What do you mean for what?

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.

I never canceled a credit card like this. They just want me to send it back.

Very weird but unlucky you I guess :)

No consumers will eat the cost of a bunch of boomers who want to keep using cheques.... any sensible company will tell those senior citizens to get with the times.

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 still use cheques. I am definitely not a boomer. I also like paper statements, use cash and sometimes do paperwork on slices of dead trees.

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.

Cheques were de facto abolished here so long ago that I can't remember the year I last used one, must be at least twenty years ago. The bank I have been using for more than the last ten years has never issued cheques.

Yeah, I think for anyone under the age of 35 in my country, cheques only exist in the giant novelty kind given away in lotteries or politicans at PR events. Current teenagers wouldn't even remember their parents using them.

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