Fighting For Consumer Justice

Many of you do not know the whole story of what occurred between me and Xcel Energy.  This post is meant to provide a summary of what transpired.

November 2006 – My wife and I had a financial summit with our landlord to discuss the energy bill and we realized that we need to enroll in a budget plan to stabilize our heating costs.  Winter is expensive in Minnesota and summer is usually cheap.  Xcel offers a plan that allows for averaging of monthly bills across a year with overages adjusted and refunded if necessary.  Jason calls Xcel and asked to be enrolled.  Was told they would send material by mail.  Material is received, registration is sent to Xcel.

December 2006 – Figuring we were at a point of leveled payments throughout the year.  Auto pay is enabled for this account this way we wouldn’t forget to make our now stabilized monthly payments.

Fast Foward…

Monday, July 2 – I became aware that our budget has less give in it than usual.  I started analyzing all the monthly payments and notices that Xcel bills seem rather high.  Concerned about a possible gas leak I called Xcel.  When discussing this with the customer service representative I was informed that she was not trained to discuss the plan in which I was enlisted and forwarded me to another service representative.

I thought this was odd and so did the most wonderful service representative in the world.  Marge took the call and proceeded to inform me all about how Xcel tricked customers into signing up for a high risk Fixed Payment Scam instead of a Averaged Monthly Payment Plan like I had asked for.  Marge also mentioned that very few customer service representatives could tell the differences between the two plans as one allows an average payment over the course of the year and the other offers a stable amount payed per month.  I asked Marge how to get out of this plan and she said it was not possible as I had signed a contract for 1 year admittance to this high risk scam.   She said the only way out of the plan is to watch for a nondescript piece of mail in October or November that would allow us to elect out of our automatically renewing contract.  I asked Marge how I could have signed up for this plan, I am not a risk taker, and simply asked for the budget plan.  She informed me that many sales representatives at Xcel simply were not educated on the differences and therefore quite a few Minnesotans requested the budget plan and were instead signed up for the Fixed Price Scam.

That is the story at this point.  Keep watching here for future updates.

This whole deal