Holy cow, I really do have to manage my own life!

I recently awoke from sleeping off a long and cushy trust bender to find myself wondering where I've been for the past decade or two.

You can not and should not trust other people, even the professionals—doctors, creditors, insurance companies, etc.—to have your best interests at heart and/or to make the best decisions on your behalf. They are not smarter than you nor are they more organized. They do not know you, your spouse, or your children better than you do. They do not have your instincts. You can't assume that they have your complete lack of guile.

I understand that professionals are in business to make money and that, unless they actually are charitable organizations, they are not charitable organizations. I'm a good little capitalist. I even try to make a buck or two myself.

What I do not understand nor can I accept is the growing trend towards sloughing off customer service and professionalism. Professionals don't even put on a good show anymore. I recently considered fashioning an invoice and sending out bills to various places charging them for my time. If I'm going to do their job for them, I might as well get paid. Or at least I can make a point.

Here are some recent examples of me having to actually manage my own life.

• Credit card companies keep shuffling my due dates around, hitting me up with late fees, and raising my interest rates and therefore my minimum payments. I suspect they do this since so many of us have credit card payments on BillPay with our banks. This of course we did because they used to send our invoices late and skip sending them altogether every four months like clockwork. My Merrill Lynch card did this to me a month ago. When I called, they were incredibly wonderful and fixed it for me, but when I requested a lower interest rate, and they found out I'm now a Stay at Home Mom, they refused my request for a lower rate and lowered my credit limit. No matter that my husband has a full-time job and I have never had a late or missed payment (that wasn't due to them shuffling due dates around). I understand where they are coming from, but it did feel like a slap in the face. PayPal just did it to me as well. Please be aware that they just went from a 25 day to a 20 day billing cycle, and that your payment due date has been moved up a few days. If your payment is late due to this, they will hit you with a $39.00 late fee, and raise your rate and your minumum payment. But if you call them right away they will fix it for you.

• Care(ha!)Credit is a creditor that many of us use for dental or veterinary expenses. The idea is that you do not have to pay any interest on your charge for a specified period of time. However, if you do not pay off a charge by a certain date, you will be hit up with the deferred interest. Sort of like how the furniture stores do it. What I did not know is that CareCredit does not automatically apply your payments to the charge set to expire the soonest, as one might expect and as logic would dictate. They apply part of your payment towards the soonest expiring charge, part of your payment to any accumulated interest charges, and part of your payment to each outstanding charge. You can, of course, call their Customer Service number 877-295-2080 and tell them how to allocate your payments. (They apparently outsource their Customer Service to India though, and you may have a hard time communicating with them if you're not good at deciphering thick accents, which I am not.) But you shouldn't have to. Why would anybody in their right mind want part of their payment to go towards the charge expiring last? What kind of sense does that make? None. But it makes sense to CareCredit because it allows them to shaft you, and I'm taking this from their Payments disclaimer in itsy bitsy print on the back of my invoice:

We reserve the right to select the method by which payments and credits are allocated to your Account in our sole discretion. The payment allocation method that we use may result in higher Finance Charges on your Account, depending on the types of transactions you make (such as promotinal or non-promotional purchases), and the timing and amount of your payments. For example, on promotions requiring minimum payments, payments over the minimum will usually be applied to those promo balances before non-promo and other balances. If you have a no-promo balance, this may reduce the benefit from the promo. If you want to change this allocation, please call Customer service.

• I have been hypothyroid since I got pregnant with Joe Joe. My new doctor simply looked at the results of my newest blood test and had his receptionist call to tell me that I am fine and within normal limits. When I pressed for details, I found out that my TSH level had shot up from .2 to over 5. Although I was under the threshhold they were using that listed 5.5 as the upper limit, I was way over where I need to be to feel human. I need to be well under 2. I've called twice and still can't get a doctor on the phone to fax a prescription over to a pharmacy for a higher dose of Levothyroxine. I started taking some I had lying around from a previous adjustment even though I need a new dose somewhere in the middle. I should not have to do this. And this is but one example of what I've experienced. Manage your own care! Get copies of all blood tests!

• Our family Wageworks FSA account (medical savings with pretax dollars) has been frozen for months now. Every time we fax them a receipt, a new charge pops up. And these aren't charges to a drug store, where I might be using the funds to buy diapers. These are charges to Labcorp. What might I be purchasing from them that is non-medically related? Anyway, I finally got everything cleared up after priting out froms from my insurance website, scanning and faxing them over. But one charge needed to be canceled and rebilled as it was actually from a previous year. Well enough. I called the doctor's assistant and made my request. She assured me she would take care of it "today". I had to call her FIVE more times with the same request. I am not kidding. Every time she had a "family emergency" and was doing it "today". I finally got through to her yesterday when I asked her to email a confirmation of my request to me at heather[at]howtobeawoman.net. I never did receive that email, but I glanced at my accounts this morning and I see that she did rebill the charge. Should I have had to do all this follow-up? Of course not. I don't expect any more from people that I would be willing to do myself. I was in client service for 15 years. If you promise somebody you're going to do something you damn well better do it. If you are busy, then tell them you will get it done by a date in the future. It's better to surprise somebody by getting it done early than to disappoint them by getting it done late or not at all. And you (this is crazy I know) follow up with people! If you can't get to something, you call to explain why. You keep in touch. You anticipate their needs and respond accordingly. You call them before they even think to call you. You service the customer.

• We applied for a FHA loan a month ago. The mortgage guy did not return a call right off the bat. Right then and there I should have switched to another mortgage broker. But I did not. We're reasonable people. We gave this guy chance after chance. He would do a bit of work. Then when we had a question he was always either taking "a rare day off", or "ordering month end supplies" or having (and this is quite common it seems) "family emergencies". Now we've wasted a month of our time and had our credit inquired upon by this fool and we still have to start from square one. Listen to your instincts!

This is just the tip of the iceberg. I spend hours each day following up with people who should be following up with me and correcting others' mistakes and their outright and blatant attempts to cheat us. I shudder to think of how many charges we accumulated when I was in my fog of trust and was not looking out for us. But I'm glad I snapped out of it in time to assure that I will watchdog things in the future. Joe Joe will be going to preschool soon, and you can bet your bottom dollar that I will be reading the fine print on every document I sign on his and the rest of my family's behalf.

Times have changed. It's time to jump on that bull, smack it in the behind, take it by the horns and ride it like our family's happiness and security depends upon it. Because it does.