What retirees are facing. (your folks?)

[imoldernu]

If you're still in your 40's, 50's, or 60's it's not as hard to deal with change, as when you get older. Hopefully you'll be as smart when you're aged 106 as you are today, but not likely...

Anyway... just one little case in point...

Metropolitan life, was an insurance company, when I was born in the 1930's.
My mom and Dad took out an insurance policy on me for $500... shortly hafter I was born... $.25/month premiums.

Always trusted them 'cuz dad an mom believed, way back when.

When the bank opened, we opted in for CD's, MM A/C's etc.

A year ago, Metropolitan sold the banking to GE....

No Shut... since then, a TV/vampire/crazy nightmare that has resulted in... yeah.. honest, I counted.... 256 first class letters to us about the change.
Ya don't wanna know the details...

first to GE Capital... then to new, crazy stuff... dreamed up by young people...

Six months in advance, letters from GE Capital... Then dozens of letters from places like GE Capitol, Metlife, Optimizer, Synchrony, Optimizer Plus... trying to explain what was going on...

In the past week, we have received first class letters from three of these place, trying to explain what was going on.

Today, we have no idea what where and when... Websites for all... passwords, confirmations, and "read this" for all... We have email addresses, picture verifications, questions about high school best friends, father's birthplace, first grade teacher, first favorite stuffed toy's name, and of course passwords, pin numbers, and ... yeah... social security number.

And each of the websites, for different reasons... market funds, Insurance, statements, ...
and the one for banking... one for investments... one for IRA's... one for insurance , etc, etc...

Two hundred and fifty six different pieces of first class mail, that we must open and read...

for fear of losing our money.

That's in a year... 256 letters at an average cost of about $4 per. More than a thousand dollars, on one account.

Harrassment for us.. (mom and dad) and a humungous expense for GE Capital et al... oh, if I were a shareholder!!!!

AND THAT's JUST ONE Company... Lemme tell ya about LSB...
But that's for another time...

 

[LOL!]

My teenage son hurt himself at his summer job. Nothing serious and he's all fixed and went back to work the next day, but he has been getting about 2 letters a day from the workmen's comp insurance folks. He doesn't even open them. Now they are sending certified letters requiring proof of acceptance, but no one is home to sign for them, so the mailman only leaves the orange postcard. My son is not going to the post office to get these certified letters ever. I am waiting to see how they escalate their attack of bureaucracy.

So when do you expect to get certified return-receipt requested letters?

 

[aja8888]

At least you are getting letters.

Our postman loses them or gives them to someone else. I received a mail order prescription a month ago. It was for someone else....in another neighborhood.

I love working with websites anymore.

 

[donheff]

My daughter had Time Warner cable more than five years ago when she was in NYC. She left, mailed them back the router and ended up $5 in the black. She left them our house as a new address. Ever since then we have received a monthly statement from TW showing a $5 credit owed our daughter. DW sent them a letter asking them to send a check and close out the account to no avail. The waste of trees infuriates her so on 5 or 6 occasions she either wrote a new letter or called them to complain all to no avail. Now TW is merging with Comcast so maybe the statements will stop. But Comcast is TW's equal in incompetence so maybe they will just create a new account and keep on trucking with the notices.

 

[jerome len]

Technology is great.....or is it? DW spent 2 hours on the phone with AT&T recanceling out cable service when we moved. She even has a cancellation # but we still keep getting billed......and they transfer, transfer, transfer her until she gets cut off during one of the transfers. the challenges (time and money) are huge compared to a few years, ago.
I, too had a baby insurance policy....those were the days that everyone had them....and, I still have it and get letters.....do we have too much government laws that force companies to write letters to protect themselves? Maybe I'm just getting older and crankier......but, to me, technology has done as much to complicate life as it has done to improve it!

 

[pb4uski]

You can blame the Federal Reserve for all those letters. The Fed were such morons in trying to apply their regulatory standards designed for banking to MetLife (an insurer) since they happened to own a bank (that was less than 1% of MetLife assets) that MetLife just gave up trying to talk sense to the Fed and sold the bank to get out from their regulation (at least for now).

 

[aja8888]

I still get AT&T billing statements monthly in the mail for a cell phone account closed months ago. The payment owed is always $0.00 though.

 

[mpeirce]

I still get AT&T billing statements monthly in the mail for a cell phone account closed months ago. The payment owed is always $0.00 though.

Something similar here.

I got a second phone line for work use (way back when I had any land lines!). After a couple of months I realized it was not very useful and I had them turn it off. Got a bill with a $2.55 balance on it. It also had 20-30 pages of boiler plate mumbo jumbo so the postage was something like $4 for them to mail it to me.

I figured they'd issue me a check and be done with it.

After a few months of this same bill showing they owed me money appearing in my mailbox, I called and they said they'd take care of it. A few more months go by. I call again. Rinse and repeat.

So I stopped caring and decided I'd just ignore it.

FOUR years later and it still is appearing in my mailbox every month! For some reason it's starting to annoy me again. Not that it costed me anything, but geez. So I called them again, and lo and behold, this time they actually send me check fro $2.55 and the monthly mailings stopped.

 

[MRG]

Imoldernu, I'm 57 what your describing would drive me bonkers.

One would dream that in your example when we do business with an entity, they see us as a customer, and know how we do business with them. It would be as if the customer mattered to the business. I've worked on IT projects that aimed to do that for certain industries. They worked well but never got adopted past the next level of the buisness unit it was done for. They were always on the Corporate to do list, but never ever got funded by the Megabudgetpeople.