Oops: 3.20% fee to pay Somerville excise tax online? Yikes!

[serious-noir.livejournal.com]

Correction: the fee is 3.20% of the car's value excise tax with a $3. minimum.

Guess I've never paid my Somerville excise tax on-line.
Went through the steps to do that just now and discovered right near the end (through an alert - thank you!) that the fee is $3 3.20% of the car's value excise tax, with a $3 minimum. That seems kind of high – has it been that for a while? The city does it through an enity name Kelly & Ryan Associates

I pay all my monthlies on-line and only RCN charges a fee – that's a $1 and I'm lazy but $3 seemed a bit much, so it was back to my "forever" stamps. .  .

Comments

[scf21.livejournal.com]

I just went on to try to pay the bill (prepared for a 50 cent bank account fee) but before I even entered payment info there was a $4.40 "online convenience fee". That is ON TOP OF the 50 cent of $3 payment fee. Crazy. I will waste an envelope and mail it in (envelope is equally wasted sitting in my drawer).

[serious-noir.livejournal.com]

Just took another look – I got it wrong: it is not a $3 fee – it is $3 minimum on a 3.20% rate for credit card payment.



Fwiw - I wasn't saying there shouldn't be a charge for the "convenience" – I was just surprised at the amount – and now even more surprised that it is percent-based. I have an old car with $41 excise tax – with a newer car @ $25. per $1000 – that fee can add up.

[scf21.livejournal.com]

Ahhh, I see now. Once I checked the e-check option it changed to $0.50. My credit card rewards are not enough to cover their huge credit card fee!

[ron_newman]

3.2% of the value of the car? Or 3.2% of the tax? Those are very different things.

[serious-noir.livejournal.com]

I assume of the tax.

Is this right = (so a car valued at $10,000 would have an excise tax due of $250 (@ $25/1000) @ 3.2% = $8.)?

A. is high
B. Why should a "convenience fee" be percentage-based?

Anyway. . . I'm sticking with stamps and buying more "convenience fee" ice cream.

[ron_newman]

I asked because your edited post says, in two different places, "3.20% of the car's value"

(And I'd still pay with my bank's online payment system, which doesn't cost me anything.)

[serious-noir.livejournal.com]

Doh! I'll fix that.

[surrealestate.livejournal.com]

It's percentage-based because that's how credit card fees work, so the company doing the processing has to charge that way or they lose money on the deal. As to why credit cards still work that way... I think it's just because they can.

[mattdm.livejournal.com]

And why can they? Because, this thread, basically. No one is complaining about the credit card companies, they're suggesting the vendor (in this case, the city) should suck it up.

[surrealestate.livejournal.com]

I think it's been very unclear what people were complaining about, actually. My initial impression was that people were complaining about the City, but then at least one follow-up suggested one person was complaining about the system as a whole. If the question of why the fee is percentage-based referred to the actual banks as opposed to the processors, I didn't read it that way.