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Old Aug 24, 2003 | 9:43 am
  #14  
Stefan Daystrom
 
Join Date: Aug 2001
Location: Los Angeles, CA, USA
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<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">Originally posted by Mary2e:
Yes, Billpay does guarantee that the payment will be made on the date selected & it is. However, their guarantee applies only if the date I make the payment is 5 business days before the due date. This may be because some payments are made by check.

The FirstUSA payments are done electronically, and while the agreement may say it can take a few days to credit the payment, the funds were delivered to their account on a specified date, and the date of my payment should show as such.
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Well, that depends on what the meaning of "date" is.

Both banks and credit card companies are famous for redefining the word date by fine print such as "payments arriving after we get up in the morning will be counted as arriving on the NEXT business day". When everyone plays games with redefining what the meaning of a date is relative to what time of day things happen, and your sending bank and your credit don't agree on this redefinition, it's easy to get dates be by a day off despite all their "assurances". (That, as I understand, is the real nature of the "grace period"; that First USA was forced to count payments received by the WEE HOURS of the next day as being the previous day, because their cutoff was too early in the day to be useful without that grace period. But that still means the grace period is not a full day!)
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