Don’t Want to Renegotiate Your Own Monthly Bills? Call the BillFixers!

You might remember that earlier this year I wrote a piece called Self-Careful that included an anecdote about a $99 credit card annual fee:

When I checked my statement, I learned that I now owed a $99 annual fee.

I know that the credit card company did its best to play down the annual fee, display the information where our eyes don’t look, and so on.

But it’s still my fault, because I should have known about this, and tracked it, and canceled the card. Or, maybe, weighed the long-term benefits of keeping an $8,000 credit card open vs. the annual $99 fee. Or done the math on how this would actually affect my credit score if I closed the card (I have an excellent score right now, so probably not much).

Either way I owe $99 more today than I did yesterday.

That’s what I mean when I say the world will demand as much money from us as it can take.

Well, a new company is ready to help you demand your money back.

They’re called BillFixers, and the service works as follows:

1. BillFixers contacts companies on your behalf, often pretending to be you (or, more accurately, “never saying that they’re not you”).
2. BillFixers uses negotiation skills, plus their ability to sit on hold for the entire afternoon, to get your bills reduced.
3. Once your bill is reduced, you pay BillFixers half of what you save over the next year. If they reduce your bill by $30 a month, for example, you owe them 30*12/2, or $180.

Now, some of you might be thinking “why should I pay BillFixers $180 to save me $180?” I suppose the answer is: well, have you tried to save that $30 a month yourself? I did eventually get my $99 charge removed from my credit card by calling them and closing the account—but I put it off until one day before the deadline, because there was never a good day for me to sit on hold with a credit card company. There was always something more important to do. For a while I thought I would just pay the $99 so I didn’t have to call them.

So yeah, if you’re the person who would pay the $99 just so you didn’t have to call someone, then maybe BillFixers is for you. You save a little money, they make a little money, and so on. But paying someone money now for something you’re theoretically going to save on later has never felt quite right to me; I mean, what if you cancel that service within a year? What if you move? What if the company changes what it offers and your service is no longer available?

Ron Lieber at The New York Times has another issue with BillFixers:

When BillFixers calls, acting as its customers’ agents and armed with information from their bills, its representatives actually pretend to be their customers. They do not identify themselves as being from BillFixers, and companies on the other end of the calls never know the difference.

Is this legal? Even if it is, are the ethics even remotely defensible?

The laws seem to be murky. The Federal Trade Commission, the Federal Communications Commission and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau declined to comment.

A spokesman for the Tennessee Division of Consumer Affairs also declined to comment. A spokeswoman for the state office where one of the brothers, Julian Kurland, a lawyer, had to register when he passed the bar, pointed me to the state’s rules for professional conduct for lawyers, which include prohibitions against engaging in “conduct involving dishonesty, fraud, deceit or misrepresentation.”

Does pretending to be your customers amount to any of those words, even when not acting as their lawyer? The state’s Board of Professional Responsibility for lawyers would have to determine that after a hearing and an investigation, which would presumably require a complaint. “The greatest publicity we could ever have is if Comcast sues us,” Julian Kurland said. “Maybe they’ll shut off our Internet.”

The word “Comcast” is important here, because Lieber notes that half of the BillFixers’s calls are on behalf of customers wanting them to reduce their Comcast bills. Somehow I don’t find this surprising.

As a point of reference: my Comcast Xfinity bill, which only covers internet service since I don’t have a television, is $80.91. (Yes, it went up this year.) That seems like a lot to pay for internet, although a good percentage of it is tax deductible so I figure that bill also works in my favor.

So should I be calling Comcast, since the BillFixers have apparently been able to negotiate other people’s bills down to smaller monthly payments?

And if I can’t make it happen, should I call the BillFixers and get them to do it for me?

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