Seeing is Not Believing Part 16

Hidden Fees

Have you taken a good look at your telephone or cable bill recently? The details may be shocking. While many companies advertise “low” rates for such services, by the time they add on extra fees for things you have never heard of, your bill can be twice or even three times the advertised rate.

One television advertisement for multi-line cell phones has a large $49.95 in their ad and you might think that’s the cost. Actually that is what they charge for each extra line. The monthly rate is around $100; add two lines and you are paying double. Include the service fees, subscriber charges, recovery costs, and other usually unexplained add-ons and you’re up to $240 before state, Federal, and local taxes. Plan on it going around $300 a month.

Add to that the cost of the telephone. Oh, they are giving the phone away for free? Wow. It now costs less than $10 to make a cell phone, even with all the extras. They make up for it with an “activation fee,” whatever that is, of only $49.95. Per line.

Now telephone companies are charging for each text message sent and received. There was a recent story of a California teen who did not realize there was a surcharge for texting from Canada while on vacation and the next month’s bill exceeded $20,000.

Frequently when a new service is provided, such as text messaging, walkie-talkie calling, or e-mail delivery to your cell phone, initially it is offered for no extra cost. A year later, once you are hooked, the fees kick in. In many cases there is no advanced warning that what was once free is now costing you a hefty sum. Or, if there is notice, it is in small print mixed in with five pages of similar small print that you read the first time you got the bill, but have since ignored.

Television used to be free. You put an antenna on the roof, or, if you live in a city, rabbit-ears on top of the set. Then came cable offering better reception to rural areas. Cable also offers more than 12 channels. With some cable companies you had to pay extra for local stations until Congress stepped in to end that extra hidden cost.

Now you can get cable, as part of a package, for $29.99 a month. You also needed to add telephone for a similar price, and Internet service. Actually that is not a bad combination if you need all three. Although if you want more than the “basic” package of 80 channels (74 of which you’d never watch), your cost doubles, triples, or exceeds $200 a month.

Get a free home alarm. Sounds great until you look at the hidden fees. The “free” package may only cover four windows and one door. Not many of us have four windows and one door. We had five of these “free” alarm companies visit us and the actual cost for our house (9 windows and three doors) came to just over $1,200 from a local independent company (which did not insist that we sign a long term monitoring contract) to more than $3,000. The four national companies, all of which advertise ”free” alarms, also wanted two year or longer monitoring fees of $33 or more a month. For 24 months that comes to $800, which is not so free.

After 40 years of listening to infomercials, I recently saw a product on television that I thought of purchasing. It may not have been worth $19.95, but it was something I could use and had never seen in the store. But wait… if I ordered now they would triple the order and I’d get three for the same price. Plus a shipping and handling charge of only $8.99 (why can’t they say $9?). Each. Yes, you had to purchase three, and the cost was $20, plus three $9 fees for $47.

The newest gimmicks are shipping surcharges. Some companies add on a “cost of shipping surcharge” due to the high gasoline prices. We did not see such surcharges when gasoline was going for $4.30 a gallon, only once they fell below $3.00 again. The company may not be able to tell you in advance what this surcharge is, as it is based on many factors including the cost of gas, the shipping company they use, the time of delivery, the shipping distance, and the number of box seats the boss needs for next week’s football game.