When $2000 Isn’t Worth the Hassle

There's an old saying that time is money. There's also the view that, on occasion, getting money owed to you is more bother than it's worth. My wife Suzie and I have reached that stage over a $2000 cell phone bill.

In the lead-up to retirement, we made a concerted effort to streamline our finances. That's when it came to light that we'd been billed for a third cell plan going back several years. Suzie had assumed my plan was coming out of her checking account as well as her own, and never questioned the two payments. In fact, my plan was coming out of my own account the whole time.

Suzie called the provider and walked the account staff through the whole story, in full detail. Then she did it again. And again. All told, over the last eighteen months, she has spent an unbelievable number of hours getting nowhere.

The company is a Byzantine labyrinth, a giant, incompetent telecom that seems constitutionally incapable of resolving the issue. Every phone call and every email thread has to start from scratch, because no one on their end can keep the case history straight. Line supervisors and department managers promise to look into it and call back. They don't.

At this point, we're down to two options. We can ask the UK's semi-independent communications watchdog to investigate on our behalf, or we can hire a legal representative and pursue it through the courts. That's when I asked Suzie, over dinner one evening, whether it was really worth the energy to keep plugging away.

Some of these calls run over an hour, and afterward she's stressed to the max and in bad form for hours. In my mind, the $2000 isn't worth what it's costing her. Suzie wasn't ready to hear it at first. She'd put too much into this to walk away empty-handed.

“I know it feels like quitting now would waste everything you’ve done,” I said. “But that’s the sunk-cost trap. The time’s already spent. It can’t be recovered, and it shouldn’t decide what we do next.”

After a bit more back and forth, she reluctantly came around to my way of thinking. So we're throwing in the towel. Not because we're in the wrong, but because being in the right isn't much comfort when it's eating your evenings and your peace of mind.

For all that, we can't pretend we're blameless here. We don't owe this money, but we do own the fact that we let it slide for years without noticing. Two people who consider themselves careful with money let a third phone bill run under the radar simply because neither of us thought to ask the other a simple question. The real lesson isn't about telecom companies at all.

It's about talking to each other more, and more specifically, about who's paying for what. A five-minute conversation a few years ago would have saved eighteen months of grief.

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