Somedays I feel like an old maid and others like a 10 year old trapped in a grown up body.

This happens most often when it comes to paying bills. I feel like the SAT and CAT and all the other alphabet soup tests I took in school lied about my apptitude for reading and comprehension.

Anyway, as you probably know, Luke switched from being a FT employee to being a freelance consultant as of July 1st. We are super happy to report that it appears he has enough work lined up to pay all our bills. Unfortunately, for me, this money does not come in on a nice little bi-weekly schedule, which means I Have to be creative in the bill paying dept.

I have completely failed at this so far.

For starters, we have this lovely LL Bean credit card which we usually just use for gas and groceries and such to earn LL bean coupons for clothes and toys. Good plan.

Except once we switched over to free lance I should have stopped putting those things on the card because we knew we were going to need it to float bills between invoices.

I did not.

Nor did I notice that we were putting too many things on there at a time, and despite the fact that I had all the money for the groceries and gas that was on the card set aside in my checking account, one day when I was checking my balances online I noticed that we were going to be over the limit if everything cleared.

PANIC.

Ok, fine I’ll just pay down the balance with the money we have in checking. So I sign on. Through another set of mis-adventures we have created a problem for me, namely that the online banking system thinks I have a checking account through them that has no money in it. (short version-Luke tried to set up a checking account thru the same bank that does the LL bean card and he didn’t think it took so he went in person, however it did go through but not with any money so it just sits there open with no money…)

So because, in theory, I have a checking account through this bank it only gave me the option to pay down the credit card with that account. Only problem, THERE IS NO MONEY IN IT DUMMIES, which didn’t seem to phase the online system and therefore it kept offering me the “convience” of paying from that account without the option of paying from any other account.

Annoyed I move on, there is a pay by phone option.

Ok, type in 1000 numbers, pass words, click 5, click nine, verify everything 18 times blah blah blah, say the amount you want to pay, verify it….oh btw, there is a $15 charge to pay by phone…click 1 to approve….

I don’t move, $15!!! no way, this is ridiculous. I wait for a prompt to cancel the payment……repeats to press 1 to approve…more silence …I hang up.

I move on to calling customer service to figure out how to pay the credit card online…for FREE. Blah blah blah, give out my account number once again, confond the dude on the phone with my situation, and then he lets me in on a secret, there is a sister site to the bank that is just for making payments. HA HA HA I am gleeful.

for free I can pay online. Happy day.

go to site, type in everything AGAIN, type in amount of payment, press submit, VOILA! I have thawrted the evil online empty checking account and the $15 phone charge, ha ha I am woman, hear me pay my bills.

The next day I have a bad feeling in my gut. I sign online to my ll bean card website and to my horror it says my payment has gone through except it says PAY BY PHONE nooooooooooooooo! Now it appears I am going to double pay down my credit card.

which sounds swell, except I don’t have the money.

I spend ALOT of time on the phone getting transferred 4 times to try to get someone to cancel the online payment. No go. I call to beg my bank to stop payment….no can do.

ok fine, so for a half an hour I fret, I stress, I involve all those around me in my worries, and then we decide that oh well, we’ll pay the fee for bouncing the second payment (our PA checking account is through a bank that has branches in Mass, RI and even NH but none in Maine so there is no way to get more money into the account).

I’m totally bummed and feel like an idiot and am VERY grouchy that the pay by phone went through without my approval and that I’m going to have a $30 fee for bouncing the online payment.

grrr and pout and whine.

A few days pass, no other payment clears, and then miracle of miracles, Luke’s vacation hours get cashed out and we get a direct deposit to his account. SWEET. Now if the double payment goes through there will be no bouncing, YIPPEEE.

A few more days pass and no other payment is made. I assume that it got lost in the world of technology and don’t sweat it. I have the next health insurance payment to make so I pay down the July bills on the credit card, (with that sister site again, since the fake account is still open) with the vacation pay money.

And…guess what??? When you pay through that sister online site it comes up as PAY BY PHONE,even though I was no where near a phone when I made the payment, and in fact I have cable internet so no phone for DSL was used to pay the bill.

So all that worry and stress and phone calls and emails to the bank was for naught. And btw, 5 phone CUSTOMER SERVICE people through the freakin bank couldn’t have told me that??????

So anyway, that saga behind me, I was all happy. All July bills were paid. Onto August.

I get out the august insurance bill. Hmm weird, no place to write in a credit card number, guess I have to call and do it through the pay by phone option (here we go again). I call the 1800 number. Ring, ring ring ring…click, dial tone. Weird I tried again….ring ring ring ring, click..dial tone. Grrr. Try again….ring ring ring ring click dial tone.

Now I’m grumpy. Try four gets me to one of those annoying menu systems…blah blah blah I get to one thing that tells me I’, paid until august 1st then click. DOH. Missed the option to pay somehow, try again.

After two more misfires I get all the way through to a human, and DOH, wrong dept try again, click.

Two more tries..ring ring ring click dial tone…then I get through to the correct person AND:

”we don’t accept credit card payments”. Oh great.

oh fabulous…oh…..other things not appropriate to say/type.

I QUIT. Two hours of my life to call and try to get through to these goobers and they don’t accept credit cards. And, of course, I just cleared out the bank account to pay down the credit card…so I could pay the health insurance….which now I can’t pay because they don’t take credit cards…

I don’t want to be a grown up anymore.

so now we have to pay one account from the other and send in the insurance payment late and put everything else on the credit card until someone pays us.

sigh, and I was so hoping to pay everything on time..silly me.

and did I mention this health insurance only matters if you get an amputated leg by an evil decipticon, or get some alien flu so I still have to pay the bill for every immunization and well visit for the baby? yeah, I’m loving being a grown up.