Manually pay bills every month, or whatever period, so that it's easier to switch account? Even if you're switching every year that doesn't sound like a good deal.
Once you have eight different things you need to pay a month it becomes way too time consuming to manually pay bills. Easier to just set up a mint account and check your finances once a month.
I've never understood the real significance of automatic bill pay. Once a month, within 30 minutes, all bills can be paid online at each website manually.
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I don't get how this is useful. All of my bill pay are automated and have been for at least a decade. I get paid once a month the total cost of my bills goes to one account and from the rest a portion goes to savings and a portion to a spending account. As my bills get paid the bills account gradually decreases to near zero and at the beginning of each month it's refilled automatically with my direct deposit. I never have to think about paying bills late and have infact never missed a payment.
Why not send their customers a monthly bill and cancel service if the user doesn't pay? The customers just set up a recurring monthly payment in their bank.
Honestly, this is great idea. But I'm not going to forward all my bills to some random service. If it somehow worked automatically (ridiculous, I know), I'd absolutely use it.
This is very important. I'm rather averse to signing up for paid service which is only limited by the option I provide for payments. It took me years to be willing to put a service on autopay which is merely variable, such as a power bill.
Direct billing works here too, but I steadfastly refuse to sign up for it, because I would rather decide when it is convenient for me to have the money leave my account. I will never forget that one time back in the '90s when all the utilities decided to withdraw a certain month's payments before the relevant paycheck had actually arrived! Not a good experience. Doing it manually makes it much easier to determine how much money I actually have to spend in my debit account at any moment.
Auto-pay is your friend. I would never pay any bills if I had to do them manually. My bank also has a feature where you get notified if a bill is higher than usual so they help you catch if you are being overbilled.
Especially when I was doing a lot of traveling, I pretty much switched everything I could to auto-pay. I always found the weekly or biweekly bill paying something of a drudgery. I still periodically look through stuff but it's pretty rare I find a problem I need to deal with (and that's usually something like a charge from some payment processor I just didn't recognize).
Same here. I carefully plan my bill paying schedule so as to never go below zero in my checking account. Sometimes that involves deferring payments until the next paycheck. With AutoPay I give up that ability to schedule exactly when the money goes out.
Additionally, I like to review every bill I pay to make sure it makes sense. I've had to dispute bills in the past that were unexplainably incorrect by $10, $20, sometimes close to $50, and if I had them on AutoPay I probably wouldn't have even noticed it.
I don't want autopay from my bank account. Automatically paying with a CC is ideal and then just making one payment to CC. Then you can dispute if you are billed the incorrect amount. I don't think my power bill, for example, will take credit. Plus is fluctuates from $400-$800 a month so I like to see how much it is before I pay.
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