Who here pays their electricity and gas bills by automatic direct debit? Did you know that it is likely you are financing the utility companies by doing this?
I’ve always been useless at paying bills, I would open them, put them on my desk, have a couple of really busy days and they’d soon be buried under mountains of paperwork and forgotten about. Fed up with getting reminder letters, I set up direct debits for all of my utilities thinking it was the right thing to do…
Only it wasn’t, I’ve had some astronomical bills come through since and last summer I started paying scrupulous attention to what I was being billed and debited. The thing with direct debit is that because it’s so automatic and doesn’t require much effort we can have a tendency to not pay attention to how much we’re paying.
Since last summer I have been carefully checking our electricity consumption and comparing it to the bill. Each bill I have received since has been erroneous; the first one by about 30 Euros, the second one by 150 Euros and yesterdays bill by 400 Euros! Each time these amounts are debited from my account and I have to call up EDF to get them to correct it! It’s ended up taking me more time to sort out than simply writing a check and it’s always them that owe me money, never the other way round!
Yesterday really took the biscuit though as I was not expecting to be debited more than 700 Euros for my electricity bill as I hadn’t paid attention to the bill when it arrived so was caught rather by surprise.
Thankfully a quick call to EDF resolved the situation without any upset and the lady was really helpful, even suggesting I ask my bank to refuse the direct debit if it had put me in difficulty (not exactly what you want to do when you’re trying to get a French mortgage mind…). I have never come across someone as helpful as she was and I was truly grateful for her for not making things difficult for me. Within 30 minutes I had a corrected bill and credit note (a reimbursement would take 3 weeks and we’ll be moved by then). This is one of my only examples of good customer service in France but it goes to show that it does exist, albeit very rarely.
It appears I’m not the only one to receive high bills from EDF, I read on TF1 about some poor bloke that got stuck with a bill for nearly 60 000 Euros at the beginning of January. The poor guy still hasn’t managed to sort it out with EDF now, so he’s obviously not had quite as much luck as I have.
I can no longer afford to be financing these companies; if I want to invest money in them I’ll buy shares thanks very much! It’s easy for them to get away with debiting and billing what they want and then taking time to rectify, so from now on I’ll be paying all my bills by good old cheque thank you very much!
Piglet in France 
I didn’t get the time to comment on your last post, so i’ll say it here : bravo on holding your ground at the super market! I’m impressed!
thanks for mentioning this about the electric company. I always pay by check after Orange started debiting my account and I hadn’t been their customer in over a year and a half. I’ll start paying better attention to the numbers on the bills. we recently checked our gas meter and it was a correct, but i’ve never looked twice at electricity because the bills are usually so small. I’m glad you got it sorted out and with no hassle. what a nice surprise!
thanks Amber, I am still impressed at how I reacted and can’t digest how quick off the mark I was 🙂
Scary about Orange debiting your account, that’s a new one to watch out for! Was it straightforward to sort out?
Do check your electricity debits, it’s quite worrying!
That is bizarre, Piglet. I’m not with EDF, but a local company and I get an annual bill which is split into 10 monthly payments.
They estimate my consumption and then do a check and either reimburse the excess or catch up over the payment-free months.
The numbers are always coherent – never a huge jump or fall and I’ve had no trouble with them at all. It seems to be a good system.
Might be a bit simple for EDF though, with less scope for fleecing its customers…
I’m sure I would have enjoyed a few months with nothing to pay but I don’t want to be financing them, I would rather the money stays in my account whilst it’s not due thus earning ME interest and not them!
I loved your post this morning BTW!
We don’t do direct debit with EDF. But every other bill is an estimation which means the spring bill is based on the winter bill, so we over-pay and then we are corrected on the summer bill. I wish they would just come around and read the meters everytime instead of doing it like this.
Hi Meredith, I wish they read the meters more often as well. As I said to Sarah, I would rather not pay the money until it’s due as it’s better off in my account – its quite a sneaky way of financing the business!
Do you know this estimation system didn’t exist 20 years ago ? From WWII to the 80s a public agent came ti your house every 2 months, read the meter and there were np mistakes .
By this time when you settled into a new house you gave a phone call and in 3-4 days you had a new meter and electircity ready. Now it takes one month. When you had a problem you called EDF, you actually spoke to a technician from the local area and everything was fixed clearly and quickly . Now when you call, it takes hours to get a human being who is usually hundred miles away and can’t help you immediately .
Why is that ? Because France destroys its public system . Reducing all costs, fewer public servants, privatisation of everything . When I read your trouble in France I can’t help thinking ” Hey, 30 years ago this wouldn’t have happened ” . Even our healthcare, which used to be so good, is now only a sinister shadow of what it was .
French governments do all they can to destroy all our social conquests ( gained through struggles you know ) and make France look like another barbarian nation .
I say barbarian because to my eyes capitalism is only the law of the jungle in its human form . The strongest, the smartest survives well, and the others live in suffering and misery .
So when you complain about the actual EDF ( which is no more EDF but a soon private company just like GDF has become with still more scandalous mistakes against its users ) you shouldn’t . It’s the world you seem to want : always more profit for the share holders and long live America .
Hi Phildange, many thanks for stopping by and taking the time to comment.
France must have been a very different place before, it already seems very different to me compared to the UK and I do like it however much I complain. What I don’t like is the jobsworth who consider that customer service is not part of their job which unfortunately can be found in most of the civil servants here.
Whilst I’m sure a lot of things functioned better before becoming automatised I do have to look at things in a selfish way and consider the advances in the world as well. International travel, internet, cheap telephone calls… All these have made such a difference to me as an expat over the last 14 years so I’m willing to accept some negatives in exchange 🙂
I just read another story this week about a single woman near Toulouse getting a bill for over 88,000€!! And then a second one for 67,000€ and a third for 96,000€!
We, like Sarah, have EDF and pay a monthly estimation. Haven’t had any problems so far. And it was actually kind of nice – when I moved out of my old place, they gave me a refund of almost 400€ because I’d overpaid!
well that’s mighty scary to think of all of those poor people being landed with HUGE bills… Mine pales in comparision.
I would NEVER pay a utility bill by direct debit after our experience several years ago, when 800 euros was debited from our account for a 2 month bill! It put me more than 500 euros into overdraft, heaping fees and interest on top, and EDF kept saying that we had used 800 euros for two months, which was absolutely ridiculous as the normal bill would be around 100 euros.
Only after throwing several fits of hysterics could I get anybody to take any action, and the best they could do was to agree to reverse the direct debit but I had to pay off the bill over several months, which I had no option but to do.
However, a couple of years later our supplier changed to SOREGIES, and a mysterious credit appeared on our account of about 600 euros, for which they could/would give no explanation, but which was gratefully received.
I had not realised that if you sign a direct debit in favour of EDF, that authorises them to TAKE ANY AMOUNT THEY CHOOSE FROM YOUR ACCOUNT. 😯 So no thank you, I’ll pay my bills by cheque.
Very glad that you managed to sort out your bill, and it’s encouraging to hear about EDF’s improved customer service. Let’s hope it catches on!
yes, lets hope it’s contagious although I doubt it, maybe I just came across someone who had lived abroad?
Your experience is yet another example. I bet the new company were obliged to pay it back as the books didn’t balance! How do they get away with this from an accountancy point of view? I always thought that in accountancy your books had to balance!
Echoing merewoman, no way would we pay anything anywhere by direct debit….and when we discovered what she discovered…that they can help themselves to what they like…we were relieved we had not succombed to the prelevement pressure.
Glad you had someone helpful, though…perhaps Sarkozy’s efforts to modernise France are succeeding at last…
I’m never paying anything by direct debit again!!! I’ll just have to become more organised and risk getting cut off from time to time if I forget 🙂
When our electricity meter is read, the man prints out a bill there and then with his little machine. This automatically gets fed into the system, then I go to my bank account and pay it on line. I don’t know if that’s possible for you? At least you can see the reading and the bill before paying. Maybe it’s not possible to do this with EDF?
Incidentally I read somewhere recently that our electricity bills are subsidising NTV (National TV) which I’m not happy about as I don’t have a TV and even if I did I wouldn’t watch NTV. hmm…
What a great idea!! A man comes out once a year here to read the bill and it gets corrected but the rest of the year it is so wrong, as I said, first just by a bit and now by several hundred Euros! If we stop the direct debit we will get a bill and will have the opportunity to correct it first before paying… this is what we’ll be opting to do in future that’s for sure!
How strange that you pay for NTV in your electricity bill! We have the TV tax in the habitation bill, it’s a bit like council tax as it’s paid for by the person living in the property. But, it sounds more fair than the Turkish system as if you don’t have a TV then you don’t pay it. Seems unfair to me if you have to pay for something you don’t even have!
I’ve had a couple go-arounds with them, the first being a 250 euro bill for the month I wasn’t even here last year. Luckily, I had never signed up for direct billing. They still overestimate but when I call them to ask them to change it, I give them the correct readings and they rebill me. Luckily, they have an english-speaking number because I’m not sure if I could do this in french. But like you, there is no way I’m in charge of financing EDF.
I didn’t know they had an English speaking number! I wish I had known that when I was first here as I used to spend ages trying to deal with them 😦
Wow, thank you for this post! Perfect timing! I was just considering changing from paying by cheque to paying by debit of our account. Definitely not changing now!
Glad the post was of help! You’re right not to change, too many horror stories!
What bad experiences for those commenting above. We get an email asking us to read the meter for the two monthly bill.
I do this and on my email a/c site feed in the numbers. They confirm I’ve done it and I get the actual amount to pay emailed and the date it will come out of the bank. They have to physically read the meter once (or twice) a year and check that I havn’t been under reporting I suppose. So far absolutely no problems. But I’ve always had poor service in the UK with estimates, here in France I’m happy with the system.
My problem is paying for water leaks that you are not aware of untill the bill comes!
Hi Lesley, yes tell me about the water leaks!
Your experience sounds much more sensible than most, I’m not surprised you’re happy! It sounds like a fair system and it sounds as if it works 🙂 Is it EDF? If so, I wonder why this isn’t offered to everyone?
I do like Lesley and it’s allright . I did protest years ago when they stopped sending men every two months and started estimations. So they offered me this possibility . By this time you still could go to your local EDF and speak to somebody within 5 minutes . Why that ? Because they didn’t decide yet that to ” reduce the debt” they had to employ nearly nobody .
You know Piglet, I’m not opposed to technical progress at all . I’m opposed to unemployment, and on a selfish point of view to the extremely bad service you get know in France, from the eighties every year worse because there’s not even half of the servants we had . This going with the explosion of prices since the progressive privatisation of our public services .
When I moved from a place where water was under public control to a village near by where water was under a private company I paid 5 times more for the same amount . Look at the prices of electricity in California after the ” all private” .
Now they’ve been slowly destroying SNCF for 20 years and half of the trains have trouble . No more maintenance, not enough employees. S… ! Trains in France used to be a dream, 5 minutes late was remarkable . It was like that since my birth to the nineties . In hospitals we had no waiting, all medicines were refunded quickly… The list is too long .
If you had known this country up to 1990 you would see the degradation . This has nothing against technical progress . It’s only a question of ” In which pockets does all the money go ? “
Thanks Phil, you really make me want to have known France “before”, nowadays the majority of the civil servants seem lazy and jobsworths which means that I’m more likely to support the privatization rather than jobs for everyone… It is a shame that things have changed so much and we can no longer appreciate how things were.
I came to France in 96 and saw a tremendous change when the Euro came in, everything became so expensive! It certainly took some getting used to!
Hi!
We do the same thing as Lesley, we read the meter after an email reminder from EDF. Then we enter the numbers on the website and they calculate and direct debit the account for that amount. Then once or twice a year they send someone around to make sure we’re giving them the right numbers. It’s called “relevee de confiance” instead of the annual estimation. It’s been working great the last couple of years and then that way we pay what we use in the winter and have smaller bills in the summer! Much better than the estimation option!!! But it is true that when you sign a direct debit authorization in France you authorize any amount to be taken out so it is something to be aware of.
Hi Milkjam! Thanks for stopping by! This sounded good and like something that might work for me until you got to the part about direct debit! I so want to avoid direct debit! When I move I’m going to revisit all of the options and maybe I can pay by TIP? This last experience has left a bitter taste in my mouth as I keep my account balanced just so as it does not earn interest so being debited for such a high amount left me in the overdraft – not something I’d accounted for!
Strickes me that when we did our French lessons before moving to France the Prof. could use examples of how to deal with the Customer Service Department (open only when there is no vowel in the month) and the Utilities rather than how to book a double bedded room or ask what flavour ice cream is available.
You were lucky Lesley! Sounds as if you had a “real” French teacher! The only French I did before coming here was at school and that was pathetic! We learned all about recycling and going to the public dump and other useless things… Thankfully I went to the Alliance Francaise once I got here as well as uni and had some great friends so picked it up quickly!
I am like a couple of the others, and I pay the exact same amount per month by direct debit. I thought that the monthly fee was quite high considering the tiny apartment I lived in, however when I moved out I got a nice 100€ refund. It was quite scary to think perhaps they might completely underestimate the bill and I’d have to pay loads more when I moved out… luckily that wasn’t the case.
Thanks Kiwi in France for dropping in! It sounds as if the monthly option is nice as it is constant so much better for budget planning, but I’ve noted the majority of you get refunds so once again you’re all funding the electricity company – money in their pockets earning interest rather than yours so to speak. I bet if I opted for this option I would end up owing them loads and loads at the end!
No piglet, the best way is Lesley’s and MilkJam’s . You pay every two months, and you really pay for what you used .You have to ask for the system called ” relevé confiance”, and when you’re in, all you have to do is read your meter and send them either by email or telephone ( free call from your house phone ) . They trust you ( confiance) and every 6 months only they come and read themselves . No mistake, no extra money to refund, no bad surprise .
Sounds the best I agree!
Yup! When you do the relevee de confiance they ONLY direct debit the amount they confirm to you prior to doing the direct debit (based on the calculations you provided). It is not an estimation so you know prior to the direct debit how much is due to leave and on which date.
The TIP system is really only a 1-off direct debit, again with your bank details they agree to take only the amount indicated on the TIP and I don’t know if they allow a TIP system for a relevee de confiance given that it wouldn’t work out time wise for you to enter in the meter number and then wait for the paper to come in the mail.
Hope that helps.
I use TIP for lots of other things, it took me a long while to work out I didn’t need to include a cheque with it as well 🙂 French hubby still doesn’t realise so leaves that type of thing down to me!
I use the ” relevé confiance” and I pay by TIP. They record the amount I tell them, then they establish the TIP amount according to what I said . For nothing I would allow a direct debit, neither income taxes nor phone nor rent. Every time there is a mistake you loose your money for a while and it takes hours of hassle to get it refunded, specially with private companies .
excellent! I’ll definitely be requesting this next time!
I must’nt complain again, but most of the problems appear to stem from the banking system. Fear of being unable to cancel DD, money paid out without authorization etc etc. The funny thing is that Crud Agricole have just upped their charge for having a Carte Bleu, without any notification, and so our banking with them now costs €120 a year.
wow Lesley, that’s expensive, what do you have, a platinium card?
Did you know that it’s possible to negotiate a lot of the card and bank charges with your bank? I do for everything and never pay “standard” charges anymore! In fact, I’m in the process of moving away from the LCL to another bank and this will be one of the deciding factors for me. 120€ a year is a HUGE amount to pay!!
Yeah the thought of owing them money was very very scary! But I knew that paying 45€ per month for my tiny apartment was a little excessive as I didn’t have an oven, microwave, tv and hardly ever used the heating. We had a similar thing in NZ but the checks on our usage was every 3 months, the estimations were usually completely wrong and we’d end up forking out more when they finally read our meter. Yip we are definitely giving them interest on our money but it’s easier to do on a tight budget.
that reminds me of when I used to rent a studio and I used to get a 1000 FF bill every two months, I was like you and didn’t have any oven, microwave or TV so it was a lot to pay! I can’t remember if I got a refund or not though, it was such a long time ago 😦
The latest news for me is that EDF have refunded me already! I wasn’t expecting a refund yet, they said we’d wait until le solde de tout compte when we move out but just checked my account this morning and there it was, a refund! I have to say that despite the mistake I’ve been pretty impressed by how EDF handled it, I guess I’ve been very lucky 🙂