I almost overdrew my credit card
Arrrgh! That is one of the noises I made yesterday when I thought I had sent my card into 
overdrive…thereby jacking my interest rate up to the default rate. As you know Honey and I share a family plan on our cell phones so we each pay a portion. Now I got the Chase Freedom Card that gives me points so I was using that to pay whatever I can and then use the Electric Orange account to pay the card before the interest kicks in.
Now I pay the cell bill one week before it is due. I do this for two reasons mainly. One is to keep the money in my account as long as possible and the other is to allow enough time for the payment to go through so that I do not stuck with a late fee. This billing period Honey paid his portion of the bill early so there was just my part showing as the balance. I figured I could go into the account and set up the automatic billing so I would never have to worry about paying that bill. I thought it would take the balance that was left on the account from my card.
I checked the balance on the account yesterday and saw that it was at a negative amount, meaning that there was a massive overpayment. What?
I looked and saw that the overpayment was the full amount of the monthly bill. I panicked and assumed that it had come off my card. Well this was a problem because the full payment was about $40 MORE than the available balance left on that card because I had been using it for all my purchases. When I logged in to the system I could not find the bill payment but I thought that was because it was barely a day old and just had not posted yet. I scrambled around to find money to pay to the card but there was only $10 in my checking account because I do not keep much money in my checking account. I paid the $10 and was assured it would go through that day. Well that was all well and good….but it still left about $30 that would be overdrawn on my credit card. All the rest of my money was in my other online accounts and it would take at least three days to transfer across, by which time the bill payment would have gone through.
I called Honey all in a panic and told him what happened. He then told me that he had also set up HIS card to do the automatic transfer and the payment must have come from his card, in addition to the manual payment he had already made.
I called the credit card company and they said that there was no cell phone payment coming from my card…..but they did see an authorization for a $10 payment. Okay now. So this means that my card was not in overdraft (whew!) but I did just send an unnecessary payment to the card when no payment was due (boo!).
In the end it all worked out for me because I much rather paying the $10 than having my interest rate jacked up to 9 billion percent because of that error.
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So glad to hear it worked out.