Nothing is tough to cancel; just nuke the credit card and tell them to pound sand.
Never, ever, allow pre-authorized payments out of a bank account. At most, from a credit card. Use a throwaway credit card number if you have that available.
Never share your banking information other than credit card numbers with any vendor.
Whenever signing up to pre-authorized payments is optional, make sure it's easy to revoke before getting into it.
I only do such a thing for my cell plan, which is a monthly pre-paid thing. I can go in there and revoke it at any time. If you have it set on automatic, you get some benefits, like more gigabytes.
If post-dated cheques are an option, that's not a bad way to go. Young people should learn how to write checks. (I'm using both spellings cheque and check here on purpose.)
I pay condo management fees via post-dated cheques. I write them around half a year in advance or so. They cannot cash a cheque before the date written on it. You can ask for unused cheques back: they are physical tokens, using copies of which would be fraud.
Tip: if you're under forty, ask a baby boomer in your family for a run down on cheque writing and cashing.
You can't really rely on it, but if you ask your bank nicely, they might enforce it and wait to process a postdated check. My credit union says there's a $15 charge for a postdated order per check, so I'd rather save my money and provide the check later.
It's kind of like stale dated checks; the bank doesn't have to pay a check that's more than six months old; but you can't rely on it, the bank can pay that check and if they do, it will come out of your account; the bank has no duty to you to not pay stale dated checks.
They don't say it can never happen, but if a post-dated cheque is prematurely cashed, it's a problem, and you can complain about it to have the payment reversed. You should complain before the date on the cheque (after which it is more or less moot).
I'm also in Canada and when my landlord prematurely cashed a post-dated cheque the bank (TD) said they couldn't stop him from doing that. So apparently some branches haven't gotten that memo. But good to know I can complain if it happens again.
Never, ever, allow pre-authorized payments out of a bank account. At most, from a credit card. Use a throwaway credit card number if you have that available.
Never share your banking information other than credit card numbers with any vendor.
Whenever signing up to pre-authorized payments is optional, make sure it's easy to revoke before getting into it.
I only do such a thing for my cell plan, which is a monthly pre-paid thing. I can go in there and revoke it at any time. If you have it set on automatic, you get some benefits, like more gigabytes.
If post-dated cheques are an option, that's not a bad way to go. Young people should learn how to write checks. (I'm using both spellings cheque and check here on purpose.)
I pay condo management fees via post-dated cheques. I write them around half a year in advance or so. They cannot cash a cheque before the date written on it. You can ask for unused cheques back: they are physical tokens, using copies of which would be fraud.
Tip: if you're under forty, ask a baby boomer in your family for a run down on cheque writing and cashing.