YIKES !!! tiaa-cref life insurance screwup !!!

[greenspam]

Imagine my dismay when I clicked on my tiaa-cref acct late last night, and just routinely checked the life insurance info, and saw this:

"You do not have any Active Life Insurance policies with us. If you have any questions, please contact one of our Insurance Service Counselors at 1-800-223-1200."

tossing and turning thru the night, hoping i don't perish.... then further dismay when i called first thing in the morning, and they informed me that my policy has been inactive for the whole past year, because they never received the premium !!! apparently, my credit card # had changed, they notified me, and i never responded!!!

...and now, it would take at least 3 weeks to get re-instated !!! would i have to live in a bubble during these 3 weeks ?!?!

and, from dismay to disgust when i checked my credit card acct statement from last october, and there it is, a tiaa insurance premium payment !!! I had indeed paid !!!

...so another quick call, and they tell me the same story, but i retort, no, here is the payment, in black and white, from my CC last october...

tiaa response: "we will research it"...

my response: "hurry up -- if i drop dead, i don't want my family living in the streets !!!"

moral of the story: always check on your accts, life insurance policies, etc... had something dreadful occurred to me in the past year, my family would have been wrongfully SOL !!!

i'll let u know what happens. but, my main message here is: BEWARE !!! even the most reliable of companies (tiaa-cref has been great to me in the past) can screwup !!!

[Boglenaut]

Yes, but the stress of trying not to die for 3 weeks may kill you!

Stay healthy, look both ways when crossing the street.

[sscritic]

I hate automatic payments. Send me a bill, and I will pay it.

Several months, I started an internet access/phone plan which requires automatic charges to my credit card. Last month, the charge didn't appear, so I called them to find out why I had not been charged. I just hate it when I have to call companies to remind them to bill me, but sometimes that is what you have to do.

[greenspam]

yes, boglenaut, the stress of trying NOT to die is killing me !!!

seriously, i got this weird feeling last night, what if i croak in my sleep, without life insurance !!! my wife will kill me !!

[greenspam]

good, they just called, admitted their error, and my policy is re-instated.
i just hope the policy does not get used any time soon...

[Boglenaut]

Now make sure they don't charge you retroactively for the year you were not insured.

All's well that ends well.. and you saved a year of insurance premium by (unknowingly) living life on the edge.

[Levett]

Greenie,

These days getting a call from a large company that's willing to admit its error is an increasingly rare experience.

Glad all is well and stay well. Bob U.

[nisiprius]

Just another spin of the old broken record: be careful about "going all-electronic." This is a perfect example of something that is more likely to happen with an all-electronic system than a mailed-paper-based system.

It's particularly bad if the billing only happens once a year. And people forget that simply renewing a credit card--no account number change, just expiry change--is a credit card change and all your accounts that bill the card need to be updated. You do, of course, have a list of every online account that has your credit card information? Really? You actually do? Well, I'm impressed, because I sure don't.

A problem that people are unaware of is--this is based on personal experience, not statistics, but I'll bet the statistics would bear me out--people gripe about the USPS, but paper mail delivery is far more reliable than email delivery. It's not that unusual for email to be lost. Worse yet, because people sometimes get notified of an email delivery failure, people assume that they will always get notified; 'taint so.

Anything that's from a company, even a completely legitimate company that you've done business with for years, can trip a false positive and fall into a spam trap, and the companies that operate spam filters are always tinkering with them so a notice might get through last month and next month, but not this month. I used to think the answer was letting you see the filtered messages, but I now have a couple of email accounts that do let you browse the "quarantine" area, and it's no good: I can't summon the energy to read a hundred subject lines every week about Viagra, and about Mrs. Anne Gomes (who is suffering from a cancerous ailment with limited days to live and wishes to donate USD 3,300,000 to me because she trusts me to carry out her wishes to uplift the downtrodden), looking for real messages which are never there, except when they are.

[verbose]

My electronic transactions have hand-entered equivalents in Quicken's calendar. Thus, I have a dated reminder to make sure the transaction actually occurred in one of my accounts.

[paulsiu]

Sorry to hear about your woes. If I were you, I'll try to avoid accident prone activities.

That reminds me, it's time that I set up a calendar for payment. We do it for anniversary, why not bills.

Paul