PocketCoinage

You have to be careful when making principal payments on your bills.  Make sure you read how extra amounts are handled by each company.

For example, my Chase Auto account would take any amount over the current month’s minimum payment and apply it as the next month’s regular payment.  This would become a problem especially when making payments online.  There was no option box to check “principal payment”.  In order to just make a principal payment, I would need to write a check and send it to a specific address.  However, since I made my normal monthly payment via check, I had the option of checking “use remaining as principal” on the payment stub.  By doing this, any amount over my normal monthly payment was applied as pure principle.  If I did not check this box they would assume that I wanted to apply any amount over the minimum as next month’s regular payment.

On the other hand, with my Wells Fargo home mortgage, if I make a payment greater than the minimum they automatically apply the remainder as a principle payment.  I accidentally discovered this when I sent two payments out in the same month.  One was applied as pure principal!  Being paranoid, I called them up just to make sure nothing was wrong.  The representative explained the process to me and offered the option to make this payment a non-principal payment.  Since I had adequate funds, I opted to keep this one as pure principal.

What kind of principal or bill payment issued have you encountered?