Best Of 2022 - It Turns Out Auto(matic) Payments Are Different Than Auto(mobile) Payments
I woke up this morning to a startling discovery. The car was in my driveway and locked as of 6:48pm last night, so how did this happen? There have been stories of some people's cars getting stolen from their homes, so I figured that a master thief had just added another notch on their belt. I have a security system that picks up if a car is going too fast on the street which surprisingly had no footage of the incident. We also didn't hear anything from the house, so I eliminated any windows being broken. So how did this happen?
We had just gotten a new minivan a few months ago. I had always been excited to own my own minivan with captains seats and tons of room, so this one hurt.
I called the authorities to alert them of the matter.
Having zero experience in these type of matter, I had a bunch of questions.
- Is this car already in a chop shop?
- What does this have to do with the chip shortage?
- Is this like a missing person where if you don't find them within the first 48 hours it's probably long gone?
The Police were very helpful and filed a report, but just as I was going inside, the Officer yelled to get my attention. He said that the card was repo'd. What?! How did this happen? I had set up autopay on this months ago…
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After digging through my emails, what happened was the first payment was made on December 6th. At that point, I elected to go paperless as it was my first time logging in to this financial company's website. I got an email alert saying I had scheduled the auto payment.
What I intended to do was schedule auto(matic) payments to happen on a monthly basis. What this actually means is I scheduled an auto(mobile) loan payment to happen that day. Obviously an oversight, but can be very confusing based on language.
After that, I only got one email on January 14th saying I had a payment due soon, but since I had thought I set up autopay, I didn't sweat it. But I can now happily report that I've paid off the balance and will be picking up the car tomorrow. This is also one of the best case scenarios as we'll have the car back in a day. Looking forward to driving that sweet whip around the suburban streets soon!