Protect your credit rating! No one else will…

When we moved into our new flat in March last year, we dutifully set about doing all the things that one does when moving house - that invariably lead to mild feelings of self-hatred for deciding to move in the first place - such as getting phone and broadband sorted out. The flat already had the phone line of a particular company installed (who will remain nameless), so I decided to get them to install the broadband as well in the name of simplicity. However, after two visits from engineers, it was determined that it was impossible to install broadband due to the position of our flat in the house, so I left it at that and we got our internet elsewhere.

Fast forward to a few months later when, in a fit of efficiency and organisation, I decided to take some of my own advice and check through our phone bill for mistakes – and behold! I found one. It seemed that although they had never installed the broadband, the company in question had thoughtfully decided to charge us for it in the intervening months anyway. Upon telephoning and questioning this, it was deemed a mistake on their behalf and the £82.80 was refunded to us – end of story, right?

Oh, if only. A few weeks later I received a letter from the company, wanting to know why we had disconnected our broadband, and requesting that we pay the outstanding £82.80 and contact them immediately to get the matter sorted out. I did so, patiently explaining that the broadband had never been connected to begin with, and listened to a bored sounding woman explain that the letter would have been automatically generated, and to ignore it. This worried me, what else was ‘automatically’ happening regarding this outstanding amount? Upon further questioning, the customer service representative assured me that I would not be running up a bad debt regarding this issue without my knowing it – and although I was highly suspicious of this occurring, I decided, against my better judgement, to let it go.

However, upon returning from a relaxing Christmas break recently, a suspicious-looking envelope on my doormat raised my blood pressure to pre-holiday levels before I had even managed to get the front door shut. It was as expected – a letter from a debt recovery agency on behalf of our phone company, demanding payment of the outstanding sum of £82.80 – the exact amount refunded to us 6 months earlier.

I don’t want to get into the amount of frustrated, bewildered incomprehension that ensued; nor the dark levels of my personality that I visited during the following week as I spent hours on hold, being passed back and forth, speaking to one incompetent, disinterested customer service rep after another, repeating in an increasingly shrill and incredulous voice that the broadband was never connected in the first place! So I won’t. I will say that although I want to, I don’t believe the affair to be resolved, but have reached a somewhat Zen place that allows me to write about this without smoke whistling out of both my ears. I will also say that this compounds everything I’ve written on this site about protecting your credit rating, because if you don’t, no one else will. It still remains to be seen whether this ‘bad debt’ was reported to the credit agencies, thus affecting my credit rating in the future, however small the amount of money in question. If so, the most important thing will be to get the phone company to have the note removed from my credit file – which will, no doubt, cause further trauma to my blood pressure. More than that, it also shows how important it is to protect your hard-earned money. If I hadn’t noticed the extra charge, over the course of a year I would have paid the company over £250 - money that I’d prefer to keep in my pocket.

So now that the restive Christmas period is well behind us, perhaps you should take note of my plight, and spend a few hours to ensure that your affairs are in better order than mine were. Check your bills and credit card statements and question anything that is suspicious or doesn’t look right. And if you find a problem, I recommend a stiff drink before picking up the phone…

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