Spending Money to Save Money

This summer has been a pretty crazy one for us from a financial perspective, what with the move, a new job, the changeover in our banks, etc. To be honest, I often fell like I’m hanging t times, I feel like I’m hanging on for dear life. For the most part, however, we’ve managed to keep everything under control and haven’t had any major mishaps. But this past week we had a near miss with our Citi Dividend Platinum due date…

We now pay the vast majority of our bills online. While this has worked out really well for us, we still haven’t automated everything at our new bank, so there’s always the chance that things will slip through the cracks. And that’s exactly what (almost) happened with our Citi card. Early last week I logged into the Bank of America website and noticed that we had a credit card payment due on the 16th, but I didn’t have the time to set it up at that precise moment. I then proceeded to go out of town for work, return, and then go back out of town. And on my way to airport the monring of the 16th, I realized that I still hadn’t paid the bill!

Since Bank of America, like most banks, requires a bit of lead time to make payments, I knew that was out — I had to make a same day payment. One option would have been to make a phone payment, but that costs $14.95. My only other option was to do it online. Fortunately, I had set up Citi’s Click-to-Pay feature awhile back, so all I needed to do was log into the Citi website and set up a same-day payment. The only thing that was missing was an internet connection…

While some airports have begun offering free wireless internet access, I wasn’t so lucky. When I got through security and fired up my laptop, I was greeted by a payment page. There were a number of options for loggin in via various paid access services, but I don’t have any of them. Thus, I was forced to pony up $7.95 to hop online for five minutes to make the payment. Kind of a bummer, but I consider this to be money well spent. After all, missing the payment date would have resulted in a sizable late fee as well as finance charges. Sure, it would have been cheaper (i.e., free) to pay the bill in advance, but I try not to think about that.