Thursday, December 18, 2014

What A Day!

Well today was a busy day. Hiker and I didn’t get out of bed until 8 am. It was cold and cloudy outside, so we stayed under the covers for as long as we could.
Had some breakfast and then I headed out to do my grocery shopping. I noticed I needed gasoline in my car but I wanted to go over to Sam’s Club Gas to fill my tank because the USA Station was $2.79 a gallon and Shell was $2.84 a gallon. I came back by home and dropped off my groceries and got Hiker in the car and we went over to Sam’s Club. The sign out front said $2.49 a gallon but when I got to the pump, it was only $2.45 a gallon.
Came back home and remembered I had not put my Social Security deposit into my check book yesterday, so I went into my bank’s website to check it out and noticed that the Time Warner Cable bill I paid online back on 12/8/2014 still was not showing up in my checking account. It should have been there over a week ago. I went into the Time Warner website and I see that it said I had not paid the bill and that now I owed them $25.00 more. I called them to find out what that was all about and the guy (Ryan) tells me that they had received my payment from the bank, but then it was put on hold and then the bank requested the money back. He tells me that anytime the bank requests the money back, the bank charges TW a service fee of $25.00 so TW passes that on to the customer, which to me just sounds like a way for them to make extra money. He told me that there was nothing he could do about the fee and suggested I call my bank to find out why they recalled the payment and see if they would waive the $25.00 fee. I called Citibank and they told me that they never received a payment request for Time Warner from my checking account this month and they never sent out any money and they never recalled any money.
So now I jump in the car and head over to the Time Warner store to talk to someone there. The guy there (Eric) was very nice and he checked into my TW account and said that it showed the bank never sent the money but they claimed that the bank said they could not find an account with my name or number on it. My guess is that someone at TW who was doing the data for the payment punched in a wrong account number or something because I pay my bills online every month and I always double check my numbers when I input them, plus I’ve been with Citibank for over 30 years.
Eric said that I could write TW a check for the normal payment and that he would remove the $25.00 fee from my account. He used my written check to pay my bill electronically and said that my balance now showed zero and that I would not have a service fee or a late fee of any kind on my next bill. Don’t know why the guy on the phone could not do that for me.
So because of having to over to the Time Warner Store, I missed “Y&R” and didn’t have lunch. I’ll have to watch “Y&R” tonight on TVGN.
So I also noticed that my Lockheed Health Insurance was still showing that I was going to be on the Aetna Catastrophic Senior Plan instead of the Kaiser Senior Advantage Plan for my Medicare. I called the Lockheed Employee Service Center and spoke to a gentleman named Haven and went through my entire history again of my filling out the paperwork and Kaiser approving me but Lockheed still not showing me as approved. He told me he saw all of the notes in my account where I had called Lockheed several times and that I had called Kaiser several times so he told me he was going to put me on hold and delve a little deeper into my account records and see what he could come up with. Well according to him, even though my account on the Lockheed website still shows they are awaiting pending approval from CMS, that in reality I have been approved. He said they are behind in getting things posted to the accounts due to the fact that so many people are signing up for insurance this year plus the employees are taking off for the holidays so they are shorthanded. He said it shows that I will have Kaiser Senior Advantage as of January 1st 2015, but that because it’s not posted yet that I will probably pay the higher amount for my supplemental insurance in January. He said they will make an adjustment in February and I should see the difference in the money being returned to me with the next deposit of my pension check from Lockheed. I told him that I have an appointment with Kaiser on January 9th and he said that is OK that everything should go smoothly after the first of the year. I hope he is correct. I kept asking him over and over to verify that I am indeed approved for Kaiser as of January 1st and he kept telling me yes. I apologized to him for asking the same question over and over, but he told me he understood.
So it was one heck of a day.

1 comment:

  1. It is wonderful that gasoline prices are way down. Definitely good for the pocketbook. Glad your insurance is straightened out.

    ReplyDelete

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