@lyndal1838 wrote:
@the_great_she_elephant wrote:
The banks do it even better. A few weeks after my mum died, her credit card and my dad's both expired and the bank sent out new ones - two separate envelopes, one addressed to him, one to her. As he knew what they were, he didn't bother to open Mum's envelope just wrote "Customer deceased. Return to sender", on it and sent it back. Fast forward a couple of months and he recieved in the mail some promotional material from the same bank. again there were two separate envelopes, one addressed to him and one addressed to "The Deceased Customer."
That is almost as good as my experience with a well known insurance company after my father died. I rang to ask what I had to do to keep the property insured.
The young lady who took my call asked if I was the policy holder.....I again explained that my father was dead and I wanted to know what was needed to keep the property insured. The answer was that they could not do anything until they had spoken to the policyholder.....could he come to the phone.
No he could not come to the phone....he was dead. Did I have an address so and to this day I still shake my head at the stupidity of some people.
Ah, those stories bring back memories indeed.
My brother was in a hospice, final stages of brain cancer from a melanoma.
Anyone who has had anything to do with brain cancer will know it affects everything-a person's physical mobility, their ability to think etc & my brother had 3 tumours.
We rang Foxtel to cancel his subscription as we took over his bills, he was a single man but we knew he wouldn't be going home & the house was empty.
Nope, have to speak to the policy holder, we were told. He can no longer speak, we told them. Too bad, was the answer.
So.. next day my brother in law rang with a few details written out (date of birth etc) & pretended to be my brother. No problems, cancelled in minutes.
And as for banks, don't start me on them. What I would like to know is why, in this computer age, can't they make instant changes to account details?
My brother had a credit card. He didn't use that particular one, he had opened it a decade earlier for a former girlfriend who was the secondary card holder. So my sister (with financial power of attorney) went to the bank to put a credit limit on it, only to be told it would take 4 days to take effect. In that time, an extra $5000 in bills went on the card & even after the bank was informed in writing of my brother's death, they allowed that card to be used for several more months. And yes, we were still liable for the bills.
