Bank of America checking bonuses can be very lucrative if you have a real direct deposit to redirect to them, and are pretty useful for a boost in credit card rewards.
But, under any given Bank of America checking bonus article, you might find a warning similar to this comment by Ferris because there’s a potential pitfall when opening (or closing!) a Bank of America checking account: their damn idiotic Bill Pay system deletes your existing, external “pay from” accounts and adds your new Bank of America checking account. While you can re-add your accounts, it’s a needless hassle and has the potential to leave you hanging if you’re scheduling your payments near the due date and aren’t expecting to not be able to pay them.
While the interaction between Bank of America’s Bill Pay service and new checking accounts is the direct opposite of good design and consumer-friendly, I wouldn’t say that alone elevates the Bill Pay service to damn idiotic.
No, it’s what happens when you close your Bank of America checking account, as your Bill Pay service enrollment is inactivated and, once again, all your external “pay from” accounts get deleted. (“Due to changes in the status of your account(s)” – but at least you get an e-mail this time!)
Where Bank of America really gets you is when re-enrolling in the Bill Pay service, which (obviously) is required to pay their credit cards sans another bank’s bill pay service. Common sense would indicate that someone re-enrolling in the Bill Pay service might want to add the same external account(s) they had previously used. To common sense, Bank of America gives the middle finger:
Be sure to allot some time after opening & closing accounts to deal with these issues – or maybe save yourself some hassle and set everything up with another bank’s bill pay service beforehand.
Questions? Comments? Drop them below!
I stumbled on this after I opened a new checking account and BoA deleted the record of the autopay but kept on paying it, resulting in a double payment, one from the autopay and one I manually scheduled. No sign of the payment under activity of course. Online chat could not resolve it, the third person on the phone in the “online technical support” from the number on the back of my credit card was able to see it and fix it right away, so try to get routed to them as soon as possible.
I may have stumbled on a solution:
I had the same problem described by everyone else: signed up for BofA checking (for a bonus) and my outside pay-from accounts previously used for BofA credit cards had disappeared. Based on reading here, I didn’t bother trying to reenroll any outside accounts in the “new” deposit account-related BofA billpay, I just paid the cards by phone. When this month’s payments came due I decided to download the BofA app, hoping that might bypass the block on my previously saved pay-from accounts. Of course it wasn’t going to be that easy, not only were those accounts not available, but the app asked me to manually (!) add each BofA card account that I wanted to pay in the BofA app. F*ck that noise, I paid by phone again.
I downloaded the app yesterday. I logged on today to check that the phone payments had posted (they have not yet), and hit the billpay tab for shits & grins… I was not prompted to enroll as I had been every time before (since opening the checking account), but the billpay page populated with all my BofA accounts, even long closed ones. The best part is that the there are two distinct sets of ebills on the page: every card account I have ever had with BofA, with my primary outside checking account as default, and also every current BofA account with my new BofA checking account as default. All accounts have both BofA and outside checking accounts as pay-from options in the drop down menu of each ebill. I don’t understand why downloading the BofA app would have had this effect, but I haven’t done anything else different with my BofA account recently.
TL;DR
If you have BofA credit cards and outside pay-from accounts, and signed up for a BofA checking account and lost access to those outside accounts, try downloading the BofA app. Use the same login credentials that you use for the desktop website, and then check if you now have access to those outside accounts in BofA billpay online. Good luck.
Damn, this awful problem still persists. Wish I’d heeded your warning Sirtheta. My wife accepted that offer via a BA credit credit card — Amtrak — and their mindless, poorly designed system then sets up the new checking account, populates it with the info. from the credit card — everything that is, except your previous external pay from account. And no, they didn’t tell her. So when she goes to pay the credit card account on the day it’s due, nope, utterly impossible. (the new account isn’t funded yet — we tried, even took a money order to the local branch — but funds won’t be available they say til tomorrow — and only partially, cuz it’s a new account!!! But we can’t use the old external account, cuz BA deleted, and we can’t figure out how to re-attach it. Thought we had managed to do so — but turns out that was only to the new checking account, not the credit card account….. What comedy! ) Utter madness. Wasted two hours tonight talking to various BA tech non-support #’s, trying to get the former bank account re-attached so that my wife could make a payment on her Amtrak account — with the very same external account that BA had so outrageously deleted without telling her. In the end, the third person I spoke with claimed the problem was my browser — that I didn’t have flash or java loaded….. (but she wasn’t trained to help with that) Tried to install both of them — but then I find out that Chrome apparently BLOCKS any such add-ons in the latest iterations. What madness. I really intensely dislike Bank of America. Will think twice before we ever, ever do any new business with them. (that’s how bruising, time-wasting, utterly unsatisfactory this entire nightmare has been….. made worse by tech reps. who pretend like they’ve never heard of this problem before…. that it’s all somehow my fault)
Another related BofA gripe.
Watch out with your Better Balance Rewards(BBR) card rewards. I’ve auto-deposited mine for past few years always to my linked BofA checking. Easy enough.
Well, I hadn’t logged in the ‘exact day’ they credited the last rewards for Q2, 2017. Seems BofA somehow reverted my rewards for BBR to the card itself and lo and behold the next day, the BBR card statement closed and I had a credit balance to my BBR which will hose rewards for Q3. I almost think BofA did this purposely to void my $30 quarter credit.
I had not fiddled with where I wanted my rewards to go or had any issues with the checking account as it’s just a placeholder for BBR and my ML accounts.
Sleazy practices with piss-poor ‘bill payment/card payment’ process sure leaves a bad taste in one’s mouth.
+1
this happened to me too! good thing i caught it before the statement closed. i had to spend ‘more’ on it during that cycle instead of my normal netflix charge. sneaky BoA indeed!
Echoing Bo, after speaking with BofA, it is incorrect to say the pay from account is deleted. I called and, following what Bo said, despite not seeing my pay from account, it is still active. As he said, my user interface now shows a different bill pay system that does not show my account.
BofA confirmed that my autopay is still active despite it not being visible online.
They did state, however, that to avoid any confusion I should remove the autopay with them over the phone and then re-add my checking account online. They denied what is written in this article regarding having to call to re-add the account, and I was able to type the acct information in successfully (will wait two days for trial deposits to confirm it)
Yes, if you have an old BoA Bill Pay that got buried you need to call to get it removed otherwise it may continue to take financial actions that you can’t view or control. As to setting up the new one, experiences may vary. When this happened to me and spouse last year, I can’t recall all details, but one of us could set up things on the new one all online, while the other had to snailmail paper forms and maybe a voided check from another bank (despite no logical reason for any difference).
I fully agree. I only pay my CCs via the Pull method. I think BillPay systems (especially if a system doesn’t receive E-Bills) tend to be cumbersome, inaccurate and slow. I’d much rather have my CCs pull from a bank account directly leaving out any potential mail screw-up or BillPay system failure.
I’m just lucky that I barely use any of my BofA CCs, and that I happen to have a BofA Checking/Savings to pay the bills directly via the “Transfer” method anyway.
BofA’s BillPay does indeed suck the big one. Here’s how I got around it, but keep in mind that I use BofA as my main checking currently,and I only pay my BofA CCs with this method since it won’t work with others.
Skip the BillPay system altogether, use the Transfers tab.
When one of my BofA CCs closes it’s statement cycle, I don’t click on the Pay Bill link because that takes you to the BillPay system. Instead I click on the Transfer Tab and set up a one-time transfer from checking/savings to the CC in the amount I desire. The CC treats the transfer as a payment and as an added bonus there is no delay in the money coming out of your checking/savings account like with the BillPay system which can take 1-3 days to reflect the money coming out of your checking/savings. The CC clears it’s “payment” just as quickly as a BillPay payment would.
Credit goes to my wife on discovering this one 6 months ago. I had been using the BillPay system this entire time like a damn idiot!
Yes, that works if you are happy to manually pay the BoA CCs from BoA Chk or Sav. Definitely the Transfers tab is the way to go for this. It wouldn’t work for me, though, since I keep almost zero in my BoA Chk or Sav accounts, and don’t want to transfer money into them nor keep a sufficient balance sitting in them. I want to auto-pay (by pull) all CCs from my hub account (Ally), and all other banks can set this up directly, but BoA makes you use one of their BoA BillPay systems as an unnecessary extra stepping stone.
How do you avoid monthly service charges if you keep near zero in your BoA accounts?
Preferred Rewards program
This thread is interesting. BofA has been my primary checking account forever. I recently acquired the BofA Travel Rewards card. I never could figure out how to set up autopayment on the card and have always had to manually pay using the transfer tab. Fortunately, I haven’t been late on any payments. Avoiding late fees with this setup is the biggest problem for me. Because of this, I avoid using this card although my UBER account is still tied to this card. I thought the problem was with me, but now I see it is a BofA problem.
I don’t think anyone has pointed this out. There are in fact (at least) two different and totally separate BoA BillPay systems. If you do not have a BoA checking account (i.e. you just have savings and/or credit cards) then you have use of one BoA BillPay system. If you then open a BoA checking account then the first BoA BillPay system gets buried and inaccessible (but may or may not keep following payment instructions, there’s no way to view it) and a whole new totally separate and different BoA BillPay system is opened now that you have a BoA checking account.
It is NOT the case that info got deleted from your (supposedly unique single) BoA BillPay system, because there are actually (at least) two, and your old one has disappeared into the cyber-netherworld, but still exists to cause mischief. It’s not just two different BoA BillPay “accounts” within a single system. Instead it is two totally different and separate BoA BillPay systems.
You need to budget several hours spread over a few months, to clean up the mess, and stay vigilant for non-payment or duplicate payment. Also the fixes can vary from case to case (my SO had different problems to fix than me, even though our cases were logically identical).
In any case, ONLY use BoA BillPay, if you want to auto-pay BoA credit cards (by pull not push), as it is unavoidable in that case, but otherwise any BoA BillPay system should be avoided like the plague.
This is excellent info — so my problem actually stems from having this bank account enrolled from *prior* to having a BOA checking account! (Now that I’ve been switched to their other system. Bizarre!)
Thanks for this! What’s the fix though? Do I call them to cancel the old bill pay auto pay and set up a new one on the new system?
Also, I think the old system (without checking account) allowed me to select whether I wanted to pay the minimum balance or the total balance, etc. but I think that the new system (with checking account) only has an option to specify what amount I want to pay. This sucks. Should I just keep relying on the old bill pay system that I can’t access anymore?
I went through this last year and can’t recall all the exact details. But, yes, call to delete the old one. Also you don’t want “recurring payment” but rather “e-Bill initiated payment”, and so you may have to get each BoA CC to send an “e-Bill” to this BoA Bill Pay (can’t recall how this was done, maybe “pay to” accounts). It’s absolutely ludicrous how they’ve set it up.
Oh, and you may have to manually pay for a cycle or two til it’s set up.
Thanks! I think I understand what you are saying. It almost seems like BofA has made this hard intentionally.
And the BoA billpay confirmation page won’t TELL you that you need to keep paying manually.
When I only had 2 BoA CCs I had auto-pay set up in my BoA online portal to pay them. Then I opened a BoA bank account ($300 promo) and it then pretended like I had never set up any auto-pay ‘From’ account details or payment scheduling. So I had to go through the process of setting my BoA autopay the CC ePayments. This wasn’t immediately possible because the CCs had to wait a cycle or two to become eligible for paying via ePayments. The details are sketchy because the process was painful and unnecessary.
Bottom line is this process compels me to keep my BoA bank account now that it’s finally set back up correctly.
Very useful article. I finally understand why my recurring payment disappear!
BoA Bill Pay really sucks.
I really hope I missed something, because who on DoC would use BofA BillPay system in the first place?
Yes, you definitely missed something. If you want to auto-pay BoA credit cards (by pull not push) then you MUST use (one of) their BoA BillPay system(s). You can NOT auto-pay BoA credit cards (by pull not push) without using BoA BillPay. No other bank that I know of does it this way. (At other banks you simply instruct the CC to pull from your chosen checking account, and their is no involvement of any type of “bill pay”.) It’s completely idiotic how BoA does it.
Bo is right, but it’s actually more pernicious: any payments to a BOA credit card thru BOA online banking must go through their Bill Pay service (whether or not you have a bank account with them). All your cards are automatically enrolled, but it’s very frustrating.