Sharing this here as I’m dealing with extremely lacklustre support from Apple and Goldman Sachs. (No surprise there. I’m happy to post a follow-up describing how that played out but I want to focus on issue at hand.)
Every month, once all my credit card statements have closed, I go through my accounts and schedule all payments at once so that I am sure I didn’t miss any of them. My Apple Card, though, was the exception - I’d have to use my iPhone, and if it wasn’t handy (such as in another room, and I didn’t want to get up), I’d forget to make the payment, or I’d put off scheduling payments until I had my phone again. (“Apple Card” is listed first in my Quicken accounts, which helps enable a pay-all-or-nothing process.) So, for nearly the entire time I’ve had my Apple Card, I’ve scheduled payments with this method, which is probably how 99% of Apple Card users also make their payments.
One of the nice, “it just works the way you expect it to” features when making payments is that it remembers which account you made your last payment from, so that scheduling your next payment is quick and easy:
Apple has started to implement more web-based options for managing the Apple Card, and for May’s payment, I decided to give the web interface a try, as that would reduce my dependency on my iPhone. Unfortunately, this did not work out as expected as it usually would, due to a really sneaky difference that one can fail to notice - for your first payment scheduled using the web interface, it will not default to the last account you’ve used when paying from your phone, but instead, the account whose bank name is alphabetically first. Unfortunately for me, that is not my usual payment account:
(The only thing unknown is whether or not the website will remember the last account used for future payments, I’m going to guess that it does.)
I shared this with Apple/Goldman Sachs in a chat, asking to have the payment corrected, but it had already gone through before I had caught it. Thankfully, the account it’s paying from does not charge any overdraft fees, so it should just bounce back, and I’ll immediately schedule a payment from the correct account once it does. I asked Apple Card chat support if any interest charges could be waived, since the default setting on the website was not something I noticed. As they can only issue a credit once the interest has been charged, they’ve put a note on my account, and I’ll have to contact them again once the interest has posted. I’ll share how that goes once I do that.
In hindsight, I should just set-up automatic payments, but I like manually entering the payments into my Quicken register and keeping an eye on cash flows. I should have also removed some bank accounts as I’ve streamlined down to using just one for all payments.
If you are like me and tend to be a little more hands-on with your finances, be mindful of this if you decide to use the Apple Card web site!