Authors:
Susan Brosnan, Jessica Snead, Patricia Hogan, Daniel Goins
Abstract:
A method is presented to make it easier to determine what services are being used by a particular person, which services can and have been terminated and which have been paid for and which services have not been paid for.
Background:
Life happens and you can be left trying to handle the bills and utility services for elderly parents, sick or dead relatives or for a divorced spouse. It is hard to tell which services are still being paid for, which ones are unpaid and which ones have been successfully terminated. Our idea is to make it easier to determine what services are being used, which can and have been terminated and which have been paid for and which have not been paid for.
Description:
Sometimes you need to take over making sure monthly bills for services and utilities are getting paid, or you need to terminate services that are no longer needed or being used. Often it is hard to get a full list of all the services and utilities, or it is hard to verify that the service has been terminated and the services company is not still charging. Sometimes you notify a company to terminate a service, but they keep charging, or stop charging for a few months and then resume charging.
Example of services you may want to cancel:
- Netflix, Apple TV, satellite TV, cable TV, iTunes
- Water utilities,
- cleaning service,
- landscaping service,
- pool service
- electricity,
- gas,
- garbage collection and yard waste collection
- phone service
- home monitoring/alarm service
- Home Owner Association dues
- maintenance calls every 6 months for heat and air conditioning
- monthly contribution to charity (NPR, WUNC, Symphony, Sierra Club....)
- Annual AAA renewal
- Insurance
- City and county tax
- Contributions to Sheriff’s fund
- Magazine or newspaper subscription (paper or electronic)
- postal service
- wine club, book club
- AARP
- notifications from Viking Cruises and other cruise lines and Insight Vacations...
There are existing apps that will look at a credit card bill and suggest which subscriptions or services you could cancel to save money. Tweaking those types of applications to help you find all the things your parents are paying for would be useful. If those applications could be enhanced to have a feature to cancel the subscription that would be even better. The rocket money application in the Supporting Art Section does this.
That application works if there is a credit card or checking account to monitor. In the case where the bank cancelled the bill payer's checking account and credit cards, that application does not work. However, the bills are still coming in and companies are trying to directly charge the no longer existing bank account or credit card.
Our idea would be to have a cross country, cross state, cross county, cross city registry where you register that X person has died, sold the house ,car or boat, moved away, is sick, got divorced and use that as proof to say stop that service. This service would provide electronic validated, secure tokenized or block chained document to certify person X has died, moved to a nursing home, moved, sold the house, car, boat, is sick, got divorced or whatever the case is. This secure tokenized or block chained electronic document would be valid and be recognized in different countries, states, counties etc.
This application/service where people can register a life status change and provide proof of the change, which then causes the service to issue a trusted electronic certification of the status change to be generated, could have options to do additional things.
The application could have additional opt in services:
- to take a list of services and the person's account information for each service and then the application would do like rocket money and cancel the subscriptions sending along the trusted certification that the person has had a status change, and the service needs to be cancelled.
- to monitor to make sure the services stay cancelled and do not resume charging, maybe the service is given health care power of attorney to help with bills, especially medical bills.
- to Integrate with bad debtor services or credit rating services that get notified when people do not pay, check if the person is on the status change application and notify the other service of the person's status change and who to contact to resolve outstanding bills due.
- to integrate with security services like ring camera and use AI to see if landscaping or the pool guy or other people are still showing up even after the service has been cancelled.
Supporting Art:
TGCS Reference 4096
