Money To Pay Your Bills  

Someone in my family told me about a fee that they were charged for paying a bill. At first I thought that they must have been joking. However, they were not.

I did some searching and found this article below:

This is one of Australia’s richest companies and they want money for you to pay them. Let me say that again they want money for you to pay their invoice. When you walk into any retail business how many times have you gone to pay for your items and they have said that there will be a $2.20 administration fee on top of that? You would walk out and never go back again.

To be fair Telstra is not the only phone company lining up for this cash grab. However they aren’t all doing it.

My mother-in-law is with Telstra and I tried to warn her about these new charges. Her response was it is only $2.20. Well in one way she is correct. However, let’s look at her last bill. (Please note she has both Foxtel and Home Phone. Let's pretend and only look at her home phone part.

This is her real bill:

As you can see the bill is $40.28

Also you will note they are not huge spenders.

Let’s pretend they pay this bill in person with an American Express credit card. We can break down in percentage form where every dollar is going.

Now she will pay an additional 2% plus $2.20 in fees. Her new total would be $43.28. This is $3.00 above what she owes.

$36.62 Phone Charges                             84.61%
$3.66 GST                                                   8.45%
$2.20 Fee for paying in person                    5.08%
$0.83 Amex credit card fee                          1.87%

As you can see, out of the new total 6.95% is fees. These fees are easy to get around.

So while my mother-in-law was correct in saying that it is only $2.20, this adds up. Try to think of it as a percentage rather than a dollar amount.

On this bill alone, it is a 7% increase in costs. If all your bills went up 7% in price, you would be outraged.

Now this is just a home phone. I called Telstra to see if they were going to be charging this on their other services. They will be charging it on their home phone, mobile phone, internet, business phone and Pay TV (eg.Foxtel - in fact Foxtel is slightly higher at $3.00).

So let’s say you had a home phone, a mobile phone, internet service and Foxtel with Telstra. You get all four services delivered on a separate bill and you pay by going into Australia Post each month.

You would be up for $9.60 each month in fees alone. Plus this does not include if you decide to pay it with a credit card as there are extra fees there.

Searching around, I did find a fee that makes Telstra’s look cheap. Vodafone, another Telco is charging $2.20 per bill that is posted out to you. You have the option to get it via email, however if you want a paper bill each month it will cost $2.20. Also would you believe, if you decide that you want to pay this paper bill at the post office there is a $1.50 charge! Just to pay your bill this way will cost you $3.70. You must be joking!

What’s the bottom line? You can send a message to companies like this. Let them know that you won’t be sucked into such fees. Start paying direct debit or by Bpay. Better yet, leave and find a company that has more respect for its customers.

If enough people will not stand for this kind of business behaviour, businesses will have to start working with their customers instead of trying to work out how to get additional money out of them.

Remember this; at last count Telstra had 24.5 million services. Let’s pretend that it only affected ¼ of the customers/services each month. This would be 6.1 million customers paying $2.20. That is an additional $13,420,000 a month; or to put it a different way, $161,040,000 a year in revenue.

They call this an administration cost! Now that calculation is only a quick one, but you should see where I’m going with this.

Talk to all your companies ASAP (gas, electricity, water, council, pay TV, home phone and internet). Find out if they have these pay your bill fees (or administration costs). See if you can get around it or change companies if possible. Don’t pay more money than you need to in unfair costs.

Online Petition Sign Up Now, Make Your Voice Heard:

Look I am so upset with these fees that I intend to start a petition to ask them to stop. As we have been talking about Telstra, I intend to collect names for a year. Once we have got as many names as possible, I will send the results to them for their formal response. Due to Telstra being the biggest, I hope other companies follow suit. You would think that companies like Vodafone/Optus would think twice about doing this if Telstra the market leader stops this practice.

Also, I will be asking for a refund of credit to all the customers who have paid this high, unnecessary fee.

Even if you are not with Telstra, please, please, please sign the petition. If you let one company get away with it, other companies will follow suit. Who knows where it will end? Supermarkets charging admin fees, service station admin fees or take away places charging admin fees. Laugh now, but I never ever thought I would be charged a fee to pay a bill!

Send a message now that we don’t want this fee.
http://www.gopetition.com/petitions/stop-telstra-charging-me.html

Go and do this online at above website. Send this to your friends via email. Lets try and get at least 1000 people to sign this petition.