Let’s talk about Rechargeable Debit Cards and Banking Fees
I bought a new car a few years ago and it of course came with a free trial to SiriusXM (th-eriously-therious-xm). Now as you undoubtedly know three of a zillion problems with th-eriously-therious-xm is that its outrageously expensive outside of a “trial”, it’s impossible to cancel, and they rival the car warranty people for being annoying A.F.
Sooo I began doing what any American would do… Purchasing onetime use visa gift cards to take advantage of the random cheap trials/extensions and when the gift card ran out, walking off and not answering my google number when they tried to crank the monthly fee to $2X.xx dollars a month.
Being a proper monopolistic profiteering enterprise they forbid the use of non therious gift cards to pay for the membership. You maybe thinking to yourself, so buy a Sirius gift card and move on. You still need a valid CC number unfortunately.
This (finally) brings us to the purpose of this article: to complain about another proper profiteering enterprise, banks! For my latest scheme I decided to purchase a rechargeable debit card.
That will show those therious thugs! I will still get the trial and have the ability to walk off without them being able to magically get the bank to re-route the charges to a replacement card number. Because you know, service disruptions. I purchased one of these rechargeable debit cards get home, try to active it and am immediately met with this bank’s own range of highly probing questions to activate the card. They of course decided my google number wasn’t a valid phone number too but I was able to activate the card without it just in reduced usage mode.
I head back over to the therious website for the 50th time, amazingly getting everything settled and to a confirm screen. Sweet!
It is at this time that I decided to login to the card’s status page to make sure they only took five bucks. To my unsurprised dismay there was $13 missing. I am like ok that’s interesting. Not the full therious amount but way more than five bucks.
It turns out this freaking “bank” charges an EIGHT dollar monthly “service” fee.
So now I am like “F” these capitalist dogs got me all while the Mrs. is laughing at me. I take out the card packaging to see it say NO MONTHLY SERVICE FEE with qualifying initial load of $200 in tiny print.
Alas, it’s a dog eat dog world out there. I’ll get em next time. My pain is your gain though. Make sure to check for the fee and if there is a way to wave it. By the way, you can’t purchase one of these cards with a credit card. I thankfully had enough cash with me to be able to purchase the card.