The Lesson of the $26 "FREE" DVD Rental

I love the idea of using the free Redbox DVD rental codes each week to watch a movie in the sanctity of my own home. And most of the time it works out OK for us. The key is to not get too greedy and rent 5 movies with 3 different codes on 2 different credit/debit cards. Especially when you can't possibly watch all 5 movies before they are due! Because the Redbox set up is that the rental only costs $1 and is due back at 9 PM the next night, what starts out as something meant to be a frugal family entertainment tool can turn out to be a total waste of money. What Dave Ramsey would call paying "stupid tax".

I just paid $26 in stupid tax. For something that started out FREE! ugh.

What happened is that we watched 4 of the 5 movies, returned those 4. All was well, no charges, awesome! But we had one straggler, watched that the following night and returned it. The free codes you can find online (or in your email direct from the company) are good for one night only. You go over that and you are stuck with the $1 charge for the extra night. Which still isn't bad considering the Hollywood Video price for a multi-night rental.

What *is* bad is when your $1 extra night fee posts to your checking account the day you forgot to make the manual transfer from savings to checking and the $1 charge causes an overdraft and the bank pays it anyway and just tacks on a $25 "paid item convenience fee". That totally sucks, especially when you are trying so hard to stay on budget.

And yes, I know that I am totally to blame for this. It was not a technical error on the part of the Redbox machine, the bank's debit policy, or a freak snow storm. I know I can request that the bank reconsider it's fee for such a small discretion, but it doesn't change the fact that it was my mistake. I hadn't entered all of our weekend debits, and we are currently running on slim cash-flow margins in the household budget due to a career transition. No, it didn't help that a check we were expecting was submitted as a direct deposit to our old, closed VT bank account instead of as a paper check as requested, and we have to wait for the old bank to refuse the credit and send it back to the benefits company before we get that $834 in our hands. But, the first step in problem solving is to acknowledge that there is, indeed, a problem. Let there be no confusion...in regards to our family finances...Houston, we have a problem!

So here we are. $26 in the hole, and needing to renew our family's financial "vows". I'll keep you posted on how the re-commitment goes.