lol, I'm rich!!

[aja8888]

Last month, I got a $20 check in the mail from the Memorial Hospital system here in Houston. No description of what it is for, just a check. I've always had Medicare and full plan F Medigap insurance so I never paid a cent to the hospital for anything I had done there (two hip replacements, SVT ablation, numerous shots, physicals, etc.)

So I have no idea why I received a $20 check.....and I am not going to try to find out where it came from as calling a huge hospital system will get you nowhere on something like this.

 

[SecondCor521]

Last month, I got a $20 check in the mail from the Memorial Hospital system here in Houston. No description of what it is for, just a check. I've always had Medicare and full plan F Medigap insurance so I never paid a cent to the hospital for anything I had done there (two hip replacements, SVT ablation, numerous shots, physicals, etc.)

So I have no idea why I received a $20 check.....and I am not going to try to find out where it came from as calling a huge hospital system will get you nowhere on something like this.

They probably think that between you and your insurance, you overpaid a net of $20 on your bill with them, and they eventually refunded it to you.

I agree with not trying to figure out why, but I bet that's probably why.

 

[JRon]

We just received a check for $48.72 from GM for a class action lawsuit over the switchblade key for my wife’s 2012 Camaro. Some people claimed the key was too long or something and could catch your knee and shut the car off while driving.

Years ago, GM sent us a recall notice to get the key replaced with a standard key. We liked the switchblade key and didn’t see a reason to replace it so we kept it till we sold the car. Now, years later, we get to go out to dinner and get part of it paid for.

 

[Golden sunsets]

We have signed on to 3 Class Action Lawsuits. 1) Mercedes Benz having to do with airbags. We got a check last week for $878.75 for a 10 year old car that we sold 18 months ago. 2) Hertz for screwing Mexican car rental users on failure to notify in advance, the cost of mandatory liability insurance and then charging inflated foreign currency exchange rates. ( I remember well both of these unfair practices at the time and stopped using them.) We will get back $988 early next year which is more than our rental costs for those years before we switched providers. 3) $100 from Mass General for a "cookie" dispute, that I don't quite understand. So we've done well on these Class Action Lawsuits recently. Just think how much the lawyers on both sides made.

Oh and I love the fact that we were contacted by the Settlement Agent in each case and didn't need to provide much of any paperwork; just fill out a form. Got to love that.

 

[Winemaker]

DW and I have found anywhere from 20 cents to 20 dollars in change left in rental units on the floor for the past 22 years. No, we never reported it as income.

 

[PatrickA5]

I've been part of a SEC settlement, so it wasn't a class action lawsuit exactly. I ended up getting more than $19,000 that I had lost in my 401K after buying my company's stock based on a "strong buy" recommendation from an analyst about a week before the company declared bankruptcy. This was back in the Enron, Worldcom, etc days when certain analyst were touting companies based on basically nothing. The particular analyst that was touting my company (and others) apparently did so to get the recommendation from the CEO (of a different company) in order to get his 4 year old son into a prestigious preschool in New York city.

I couldn't believe it when I got the check.

 

[JoeWras]

Earlier this year I joined a class action suit for customers who bought contact lenses from an online contact lens site (very reputable and still around). It was easy to sign up and I didn't even need to provide my prior receipts.
In August I got an email that asked for my Venmo user name as settlement was going to be deposited shortly.
In early September, my Venmo account was credited with $214 by the class action name as my settlement payment for this suit. I was shocked!

That kind of speed is unheard of for a class action. I wonder if it was an out of court settlement.

We just received a check for $48.72 from GM for a class action lawsuit over the switchblade key for my wife’s 2012 Camaro. Some people claimed the key was too long or something and could catch your knee and shut the car off while driving.

Yep, same class action as me, different subclass.

 

[Mulligan]

I get it though. St. Louis won almost $800 million settlement with NFL last week. Lawyers got almost $300 million leaving StL about $500 million. But if they had lost or not got the settlement StL would not have been out of pocket at all.

 

[scrabbler1]

DW and I have found anywhere from 20 cents to 20 dollars in change left in rental units on the floor for the past 22 years. No, we never reported it as income.

This reminds me of several finds back in 2008 I made. In about a 6-month stretch prior to my ER, I found (a) several dollar bills (around 7 of them) laying on the sidewalk near my apartment building, not a heavily traveled location; (b) on an empty PATH train car on my way to work I found a pile of bills including a $10 bill along with a NYC MetroCard which still had a few dollars in usable fares left on it; and (c) a bookmark inside a book my dad was reading was an unused LIRR single-trip ticket worth about $7 I was able to use for a future trip to work. Together these finds were worth about $30.

 

[Drake3287]

That's almost as bad as the State of California spending .58 cents in postage to send me a check for .05 cents! I also didn't cash it just to throw off the state budget.

 

[Koolau]

I remember them, but never used one! When I was cleaning out my mom's house in February, we came across coins in virtually every room in the house. After my wife spent hours rolling several hundred dollars (weighing more than 20 pounds), I took them to Bank of America, and cashed them in, but we had run out of wrappers. They said, oh, you don't have to roll them, we'll just put them in a plastic bag and send them to San Francisco for counting, and they'll be credited to your account...no charge!

Does the phrase "Trust us!" sound familiar?

My bank told me the same thing. "Bag your coins and we'll count 'em in a couple of days." They even gave me some empty plastic bags. Somehow, I just haven't gotten around to taking my coins in. BUT, the bags have been handy for potato peelings and ditching left-overs beyond their 3-day limit in the fridge. YMMV

 

[Venturer]

I'm waiting on my Blue Cross / Blue Shield settlement money before I plan my next trip to Monaco.

I'm with you on that so I guess we will go there together!!

 

[VanWinkle]

Class action suits are a way to stop behavior that otherwise would continue unabated, and often the only option for consumers. The benefit is the settlement together with the change in business practice.

There is a cost to everything, including class action suits which increase the cost of every product purchased. In some cases it is good, in others it is just a money grab by attorneys that have found an easy way to enrich themselves. I am not naive enough to think they are all improving our lives.

VW

 

[Koolau]

There is a cost to everything, including class action suits which increase the cost of every product purchased. In some cases it is good, in others it is just a money grab by attorneys that have found an easy way to enrich themselves. I am not naive enough to think they are all improving our lives.

VW

Let us hope that even the threat of such suits tends to keep most companies (relatively) honest with is. YMMV

 

[Walt34]

Years ago, we got a voucher for owning one of GM's infamous "saddle-tank" trucks. This one was a 1985 C10 Silverado. Of course, it was made "infamous", thanks to Dateline NBC, who put explosive model rockets under a fuel tank and set it to blow in a staged crash.

<snip>

I can't remember when the Dateline fiasco was exactly...I want to say 1993? Anyway, while the truck was exonerated, I thought it was actually pretty nice of GM to offer that voucher, even though we never used it. I wonder if very many people actually used those vouchers?

Yep, I did.

We got $500 off on my retirement present, a new 2003 GMC 4WD pickup. The old one was a 1985 Chevy model that I'd kept all that time and somehow survived not being blown up. We did not have to trade it in, but redeeming the certificate was a PITA because we'd moved in the meantime and GM wanted to see something with our names and the old address on it. I forget what document we finally found but it worked.

BTW, I still have the 2003 GMC pickup. I guess I'm not very hard on pickup trucks.