Imagine renting an apartment, and there are only two ways to pay your rent, with a credit card or an automatic withdraw from your bank account. Which one would you choose?

In this story, one renter would choose whichever option didn’t have a convenience fee added to the rent amount, but both options require paying a convenience fee.

Keep reading to see how she avoids paying the fee.

Paying rent without a fee

When we first moved to our apartment, a question came up about how we want to pay rent.

They had a website with two choices: Pay by card or pay by bank withdraw.

I picked “pay by card”, and after I filled out all my information online, on the last page it said they’d be charging me a convenience fee of about $10 for doing this automatically.

I then tried again for “pay by bank withdraw”, filled out all information.. and once again I got hit with that $10 convenience fee.

There was a pretty easy workaround.

I thought that was annoying, as I didn’t want to keep paying an extra $10 every month for rent.

The “convenience” is of them automatically taking the money, instead of me manually writing up a check and giving it to them.

So, I looked up their address, went to my bank’s “bill pay” page, and scheduled a recurring payment to that address every month.

I ended up saving $10 every month for free..

She paid it forward.

The inconvenience was passed to the apartment managers, who now have to open the mail and get my check every month.

After a while of living there, I talked with a few neighbors who complained about having to pay this extra $10 all the time.

I told them about this trick of paying automatically through the bank.

Made them happy.

I love that OP didn’t settle for having to pay a convenience fee, and that she passed along the helpful tip to the neighbors.

Let’s see how Reddit responded to this story.

This is probably why they’re charging a fee.

Another person has been using bill pay for a long time.

This person does the same thing.

Another person refused to pay an added fee.

Convenience fees are the worst!

If you liked that post, check out this story about a customer who insists that their credit card works, and finds out that isn’t the case.