This is a guest post from Stuart, a MBA graduate student from San Jose State University.

While evaluating your credit card bill, you encounter a charge on your credit card bill that you weren’t aware of. Your mobile phone bill is showing a monthly bill that you had not signed up for. Despite the headaches, you’ve still done a great thing. You have at least reviewed the bills. By doing proper inspection, you can find out the already paid past billing mistakes. If you find that there are some debts that you need to repay, you may opt for to get rid of them. Here are some methods to correct common billing mistakes:

Mistakes on the credit card statement – It may happen that there is a transaction on your credit card statement that you are not familiar with. If this has happened, then you may call up the credit card company and sort out the matter. However, if the charge had been made in error, a phone call will not suffice and secure your rights under the Fair Credit Billing Act. To ensure you’re protected, you’ll have to send in a written dispute to the credit card company within 60 days. While the research is going on, the credit card company will not be able to report the non-paid charge as being delinquent.

Best Solution: Call up the credit card company once you find errors in your bill. However to cover your bases, be sure to write to the card company within 60 days in case the problem does not get solved.

Unauthorized use of your credit card – While reviewing your credit card statement, you see that there are unauthorized charges. Someone may have taken your credit card number. The good news is that your responsibility for the theft is only $50. You can summon your rights against illegal use by calling up the card company. As such, you won’t have to write a letter. You do not have to abide by the 60 days time limit. However you shouldn’t delay when someone is continuously racking up charges on your account. Just like you want to stop the theft, similarly your card company will want to do the same. As such, they may cancel your card. However, the card issuer is not compelled to send you an alternate card. The card company can close your account or decrease the credit limit if the company considers you to be a risky card holder.

Best Solution: Call up your credit card company as soon as you find unrecognized purchases on your credit card bill statement.

Excessive charges – Excessive charges may be imposed on your phone bill. These charges are called cramming charges. Usually, vendors work with the billing department that has contract with the telephone companies to bill you for the charges. These charges may be for the Internet service that you’re not using, voice mail for different phone numbers, Web hosting and other such services. The charges may begin after you cash a “free check”, enter a lottery, or after a free test to verify that you’ve just paid off your phone bill. The charges for $9.99 can be missed easily even though they return every month until defied. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) estimates that such fraud actually affects 15 to 20 million American households every year. The FTC has brought more than 25 cases consisting of several consumers with damages during the last 15 years.

Best Solution: Make sure you examine your phone bill very carefully. Do not pay the charges that you do not recognize.

Thus, by resolving your past billing mistakes, you’ll be able to move forward towards a financially secure life.