Used it today!

[Liebling]

I had a lady call me at work today about her overdue account. Her account gets paid (mostly!) every month, but she has a certain billing date (say the 1st), and her bill is due on this day every month. But every month, she pays anywhere from the 15th to the 25th, and because of the line of work I'm in (self storage), she gets a series of letters after her bill is overdue.
She calls and asks why she keeps getting letters when her bill actually gets paid. I explain the billing date process, and also explain that although we can see she does eventually pay it every month, self storage policies and the law state that we must send out those letters every time a customer in late (just on the off chance that the person never pays again and further action is taken, there is a process that we must go through).

She then complains about this for awhile, and escalates up into a rant about how she has so many bills to pay, she can't possibly keep up, and so she pays them all in one go when she remembers. I offer to change her billing date to something that might work better for her. She says that won't work because it's different every month. She then asks don't you get this all the time? People that are late, but you still know they are going to pay?

I say not usually, and unfortunately the way bills work is that you pay them when they are due.

She then gets extremely angry. "There is no need to tell me how to run my life! It shouldn't matter if it's late! I have lived my life perfectly fine all this time, and you, missy, can't possibly have as many bills as I do".

Me: "That's an interesting assumption".

 

[Laura]

Does paying late hurt her credit score, or does it not have an affect in this case because she's not paying off debt or interest on debt? If she pays all her bills consistently late, I wonder how low her credit score is.

The number of bills she has is an excuse to try to justify her behavior. She sounds really unorganized. She shouldn't have tried to make it personal. Like you have any say in how the billing process runs. 

[Bibliophile]

Storage bills don't affect your credit score if you just pay late.  If you don't pay, many of them will send it in to the credit reporting agencies. 

Someone does need to explain to this woman that she needs to pay 2 months this month so she can get on track to start paying early...  I know it's rough, but that's what I've done when a bill doesn't fall on a convenient day.  It's hurts for the first month but makes everything easier from then on.

[Liebling]

After she got so angry when I told her about how bills should be paid on time, I didn't want to tell her about paying in advance. I was sick of the yelling already!

Besides, she is a mortgage consultant. I assume she knows how monthly bills work! I wanted to ask her if she advises her clients that it's perfectly acceptable to pay their mortgage back whenever they remember each month.

And yes, the way she made it personal annoyed me.