Tax refund, finances, and more

So today I received my 2007 federal income tax refund in the mail. It wasn't very much, only about $200, but I hear a small refund is better because it means I didn't loan the government much of my money during the year. I expect to get about the same back from Oklahoma, although they are usually slower in processing their refunds.

The past week I also got to deal with customer service from American Express and the OU Federal Credit Union after I mistakenly selected OUFCU as the source for my $1200 payment to Amex (instead of another bank which actually had the funds). If you use electronic payments, beware that they have implemented some tricky methods to make sure they get their money! The first Amex payment returned unpaid, like it should have, on Apr. 9. But Amex continued "trying" to get the money, eventually resulting in multiple non-sufficient fund fees on both my OUFCU account and the credit card. I didn't know Amex would continue trying to post the payment, so I scheduled a different method of payment (this one through OUFCU's billpay service), and arranged for the $1200 to be transfered into OUFCU before the billpay was scheduled. Of course, Amex happened to "hit" my account exactly one day before the billpay service was scheduled, so they did finally get their payment, but of course, this resulted in yet another round of non-sufficient fund charges to my checking account as the OUFCU billpay tried to pay the same charge the next day. Ugh, all this because I selected OUFCU instead of another bank to pay my credit card bill!! I guess the more frustrating thing is that I didn't have any idea American Express would continue trying to collect their payment, even a full week after it was returned unpaid to them. Of course, my account online never originally showed that anything was amiss ("You have no payment due on this credit card" was all I got from them, until a few days ago when $38.00 returned payment fee popped up). OUFCU also charged me a total of $80 in NSF fees for the returned Amex payment and the two times their billpay tried to execute the payment. (By checking my OUFCU account regularly, I realized something might be up, so I ended up transferring $3000 over to OUFCU to "be safe". Turns out I now have a $1200 credit balance at Amex as I ended up paying the bill twice). So, after a total of $118.00 fees for one "goof" on my part, I called both OUFCU and AMEX and explained my situation, my mistake, and what I think is their mistake, and I managed to get $93 of those fees returned. I still have to pay the original $25 fee from April 9th, which I guess is okay, but I would have preferred to not have anything go wrong in the first place. And to top it all off, the only reason I had the $1200 charge on my Amex card to begin with was because I had to buy a new laptop to replace the one which was stolen from me last month. Ugh!