No you can't pay me back redux

I had a more personal experience with paying off some debt this week that I must now vent. In 2007 we took out a loan to replace a car that I totaled in an accident (ask me later). With that loan we purchased our current car, a Toyota Matrix. Great car. Up until this week we've been very happy with the loan holder, originally RoadLoans.com which appears to have been later spun off by Triad Financial. When we got the loan I made sure that there were no prepayment penalties, because those are just plain evil.

Every month since the loan was started we have paid the minimum or more, some times much more. So much more, in fact, that our last statement had a due date of November 24, 2011. This is why I was very puzzled when my wife, Emily, received a phone call from Triad telling us we had $24.73 past due. It is simply impossible.

Emily spoke with the customer service representative trying to understand what she was talking about. She threw around several numbers, neither of which made sense. This customer service representative can only be described as "incoherent." At the end of the call Emily informed her that we had already sent in our final pay-off. To this, the CSR responded "Then what's the problem?" I don't know: YOU CALLED ME!

Friday morning I called to find out what the problem was. I think I spoke with the same lady, or someone equally idiotic, because she told me the same things Emily described to me. I calmly explained that there was no way we could have an amount past due because we had paid far more than expected at this point in the loan. This is when the CSR started talking about how the payments apply to the loan. Her words were "lump sums are broken up into payments." This contradicts what I'm seeing on my statement, which records my lump sum as all having been applied to the principal. Of course this still doesn't explain why there would be an amount past due.

Next, the CSR explained that the amount paid didn't carve out into even payments. This means that the last payment into which my large lump sum was sliced was incomplete and therefore there is an amount "past due." Clearly Triad Financial uses an alternative definition for "past due." I explained this several times to the CSR. She was dense as a lead vest. Eventually her "supervisor" broke into the call.

I'll take a side-bar here to explain why "supervisor" is quoted. For my first year out of college I worked in IT at a debt collection/investment company called Unifund. If you've heard of them you should probably be more careful to pay your credit cards. It was a small company and pretty much everyone was on friendly terms, so I spoke to folks in the customer service department frequently. There was an overall supervisor, but no one ever spoke to him. When you spoke with a "supervisor," you were simply transferred to another CSR. There's a good chance this happened with Triad.

Anyhow, this "supervisor" insisted on sending me a print-out of how my payments were being applied. She insisted that everything would make sense if I saw this print-out. I explained to her that I had with me right at that very moment every statement I had received from them. On each statement it explained what portion of my last payment was applied to the principal of the loan. Based on that I knew exactly how my payments were applied. Then she told me that the statement didn't tell me how THEY applied the payments.

Huh?

The "supervisor" explained that when a sum larger than the expected balance is applied it IS applied to the principal, but if a payment is skipped the next payment is taken from the lump sum. This, however, contradicts what Emily was told during her incoherent conversation the previous day. She was told that payments "didn't advance" and that a payment needed to be made every month. This statement is consistent with the wording of the disclosure form when we first started the loan, which indicated that payment was expected monthly. Of course, THIS statement is contradicted every month by the very statements we receive which, after we started paying amounts greater than the minimum, indicated payment due dates far in the future.

So which is it? But more importantly, HOW THE HELL DO I HAVE ANYTHING PAST DUE?

After extrapolating all this in my head, because I'm not sure either of the women in that conversation could actually understand the above paragraph, I stated, "So I don't actually have a past due balance but it looks like I do because of the way the payments are sliced up?" To which the "supervisor" replied, "Yes." Lovely. So why did we receive a call?

I never got a satisfactory answer to this. The original CSR was clueless and the "supervisor" gave me some line about the computer system using an autodialer based on some internal criteria of my large sum payment not slicing up evenly into expected payments.

Her explanation does not mesh with reality. This is the first call we have ever received from Triad Financial. For over a year now we have been paying more than the minimum payment and those payments never would have equaled a full minimum payment. Why were we not called previously? And since she eventually admitted that we did not, in fact, have an amount that was actually past due why were we called and told we did? And why did their website show that we did? None of this makes sense.

The sinister explanation is that they're attempting to bilk us out of more money. I don't know, but I expect had our response been passive the CSR would have happily allowed us to pay over the phone, thus squeezing a few more dollars out of us prior to our payment in full. This seems a little far-fetched.

The more charitable explanation is that they have a terrible defect in their software. The explanation that they use an autodialer is probably true. When I worked in telemarketing we used such a system. The autodialer system generated a pool of numbers and each station was given them as the user became available. The breakdown here seems to be in building the pool of numbers to call. If they are doing a first-notice phone call of everyone who has a past-due payment then their criteria for finding these numbers is faulty, possibly due to the way they are counting the payments. This would be consistent with their website's presentation of an amount past due (also false).

We'll see in a week or so which explanation is closer to the truth. If the title for the car does not arrive I suspect sinister shenanigans. If it does arrive, I'll know they have defective software.