Macy's Drives Me Nuts

[blas]

I have a Macy's card.

Honestly, whoever is in charge of their financial services department, I just want to grab them and shake them and ask "Do you want your damn money or NOT?!"

In all fairness, my stepgrandma did warn me that she's had nothing but headaches dealing with them, but I took it with a grain of salt because she's kind of impossible.

I made all my bill payments on time, prior to February. But I noticed that I'd schedule a payment for the day it was due or the day before....and it would take at least 3 days for the payment to post and come out of my check. Living paycheck to paycheck, it's hard when they don't take your damn funds out the day you scheduled it, especially if it's on a regular business day during regular business hours. Thankfully, I'm no longer in a situation like living on my own where I very well could have went into the hole.

I'm not going to lie, I missed February's payment. And, I wasn't going to have the extra funds to make it until two weeks later, at next paycheck.

Damn if there wasn't not one, not two, but THREE phone numbers that called me simultaneously, multiple times a day, no voicemails ever left. Just googled the numbers to track them to being from Macy's financial department. Filed complaints for all three numbers for calling me earlier than 8 am, later than 8 pm, and more often than every few hours.

But, I got paid again two weeks later, after two hell weeks of non-stop phone harrassment.

March and this month, I set up auto pay. Last month and now this month, nearly a week past the due date......they still haven't taken out the funds.

So, if you pay on time, they don't want your money? But if you're late, you better just turn your phone on silent till you can pay?

[Luna Baby]

Wow! It sounds like they are playing some sort of "game" with you in order to get more fees.

I'm not sure how it works with the Macy's card, but I know that when I called the bank my car is financed through to inquire about online payments, I was told that it could take up to 3 days for the funds to actually draft from my account but that it would be considered as made on time as long as the payment was scheduled no later than 4 pm the day the payment is due. I an look at my payments online and it shows both the day the payment was scheduled and the date the payment actually hit their system.

[mathnerd]

Prior to being transferred to deposit operations, I worked in the loans/lines department (doing essentially the same job, but with loans/lines instead of deposit accounts). Anyway, there are actual reasons why you might not see a payment draft out of your account on the exact day of the payment. The automated clearing house, which all banks in the US use to transfer funds between themselves, is a very old system that runs batch processing (overnight) and only on days the Federal Reserve is open. That system could sometimes take a couple days to get both banks talking to each other and get the money moved. For example, Day 1 the receiving bank sends out the request do draft the payment, that request processes overnight, then the draft is actually made the next day, but doesn't show in your account until the day after that because it had to wait for batch processing the next night. Throw a weekend or holiday in there, and the whole process could take a week. If I jumped on the mainframe to look at an account I would see two dates for any transaction, a 'processed' date and an "effective" date. So if a customer had an ACH payment scheduled, but their due date fell on a Saturday I would see, for example, a processed date of 4/8/2013 but an effective date of 4/6/13. The processed and effective date for a transaction could also be different if there was an error and I had to go back and manually backdate a transaction.

[PepperElf]

Wow! It sounds like they are playing some sort of "game" with you in order to get more fees.

that's what happened to one of my friends with his payments on a computer he purchased. he'd send the payment in early, but they wouldn't process it until it was late.

so they kept putting late fees on him.

IIRC he finally got them to stop, but it took a lot of calls, and him remembering - and then pointing out - that he was actually a month early on payments too. So technically he couldn't be late even if they waited to process the payment, cos he was paying NEXT months payment. etc.