I got my AT&T phone bill today and looking it over, I was charge $30 for at tech to come out and check our line. This is not the first time they have come out or the first time they have tried to charge me. So I made a quick call (about 10 min) to customer service and asked if they would remove it. They did and I get to keep my $30.
It is a good idea to always check your bills. Electricity, Natural Gas, Phone, these are all bills that need to be looked over carefully. If you see a charge you don’t recognize, it costs you nothing but some time to make a call to find out what it is. It might be an error or can be removed as a “courtesy”.
For credit, debit and banking accounts, it is important to keep on top in case there is an error or worse someone got a hold of your info. This happened recently to my wife’s debit card. Thankfully it happened at a time the account was low so they could not get much. Our bank called and emailed us about the possible fraud so we got it shut down and most charged back quickly. We are still not sure how her card was compromised, but it appears to have been a prank. The charges were book clubs and Netflix.com and were shipped to our home address. My favorite site to keep my finances in order is Mint.com. Very quickly and with few exceptions, you can have all of your accounts in one place. I used to use MSMoney, which cost about $20-30 a year. Mint is free.
So, keep a close eye on your finances and bills to save yourself some money.