Gym/Fitness Membership Horror Stories - Looking for alternatives

[Dingfelder]

For me, it's just the worry, from both personal experience and from reading about it, of companies restarting cancelled subscriptions, sometimes right away or sometimes even three years down the road. It can be the devil to truly cancel something once subscribed.

If you have a debit card without a lot of cash in it, of course, or are up against your credit limit with a credit card, it's even worse if you get an unexpected charge. Then you might be looking at a huge penalty charge for even going a buck over ... for something you don't want and didn't order and even cancelled years ago.

 

[SheepDog]

I prefer to push money than have someone else pull money when it comes to bill paying! I think things are likely better now, but years ago I had a bad experience with it that I did resolve, but it was a hassle!

Another easy button would be to have a bank account for just bill payment. Moving money between accounts is pretty easy in today’s world and a free account is easy enough to find last time I looked.

Along these lines I tend to think you should have at least a couple banks based in different parts of the country so as to have access to some funds even if a natural disaster knocks part of the country out for a couple weeks.

Of course growing up in hurricane country likely warped my brain, but I’ve seen banks under water before and no one was able to do anything with their accounts until things settled down!

On the road is different, but I’ve never had anyone not accept a check with a local address on it as a local check even if the bank was half way across the country!

SD

 

[HerzeleidMeister]

I'm a little confused.  I have a lot of auto-pay withdrawals from my checking account.  I had to authorize the withdrawals.  I can rescind the withdrawal authority at any time (my bank requires 15 work days lead time).  After rescinding the authority the auto-pay party can no longer withdraw from my account.  What am I missing?

You are missing the fact that Planet Fitness and the like do it any damn way and it goes through. A lot of times once you authorize it once, it will continue to go through even if you do not want it to. I've read some real horror stories recently about this but...

I like the idea of having a disposable debit card to use. And for those who say that PF insists that you have a checking account, you can use these debit cards just like a checking account if you have the router number & account number.

 

[John61CT]

Serve.com does not, they pull from any bank account through ACH, but the account presents as an AMEX credit card, can't push funds to it.

I would say the H&R Block solution sounds best for a "checking" account, don't use it for regular daily needs, keep a very low balance there.

But put the auto payments through a dedicated disposable Serve sub-account "credit card".

 

[HerzeleidMeister]

Thanks everyone for the info. I think I'll try to disposable debit card route first. My sister will be with me in the van and she was really kinda freaked about not being able to use a place like PF for showers.