I know someone who, due to ADHD, has trouble paying their bills on time, and managing their money. They found a legal service that handles their basic finances, and gives them their budget for shopping, fun-money, etc.. The service is surprisingly reasonable, something well under $100/month.
While not quite what you asked, a service like this would at least provide an additional barrier, before someone hands over their net worth to a scammer.
The next step after that, often used for elderly people, involves a full power of attorney: someone else is completely responsible for their finances, and hands them either cash or a debit card with a small amount of money that they can use however they want. But that is for extreme cases.
1. Create a separate, limited funds checking account explicitly for bill paying and the like. Replenish it periodically, as needed, but use it to keep larger balances out of reach.
2. Set up automatic payments against the limited funds account.
A significant one-time effort, but lower-bandwidth afterwards.
Alternatively, simply hire a part-time bookkeeper and/or accountant. Of course, this is also bandwidth-intensive, up front, and also demands attention to combat potential fraud.
Being responsible and watching your balance, and paying a scheduled monthly fee is not difficult to manage. Banks allow for scheduled payments as well, its a one time setup. I think the being responsible and holding people accountable to being responsible, is something that maybe you are working on , and hope that it works. Best of luck.
Online Bill pay via my bank solves this problem for me. Unless you are targeting individuals that cannot get a bank account or do not want to get a bank account, what's the point? Unless you want to target creditors to automatically send emails to people that owe them money and are late. I know less about that market, but small businesses like chiropractors or dentists might be able to use that. But most people will just hate you.
there used to be a service ( I think its was virgin money) where they would administer your personal loan so you could could lend money to a friend or family ember, but they third party would collect their payments etc. that way you have a third party reminding people to pay etc.
There's a company where I live that does some of these things regarding your bills and saving money. You go in for an interview and you show them all your expenses, incomes, etc. They will work out a budget for you, pay your bills, save money for your goals, send you a bit of spending money for groceries, etc. negotiate with your credit card companies, banks and what not if things are really bad. They set up a bank account which your income goes into, but you can't immediately access it to withdraw funds. Instead you have to call/email them and ask for it, which is good for preventing impulse purchases. Fees are a few hundred dollars for setting up, which is worked into your budget so you don't have to pay upfront, then around $25 a week ongoing.
I've had exactly this idea! It's sort of like a credit card, except a "swipe" just gives the merchant an end-point to send bills to. You still have to authorize each bill, but your bank could automatically pay any bills that you haven't contested by their due date (or whatever policy you prefer).
I am TERRIBLE at paying bills on time, even though I always have the money to pay them. There's way too much diligence required.
You could do what I do: keep an online-charges-only debit account that contains just enough cash to cover recurring services and gets on-demand cash deposits to cover one-off charges.
I have ADHD and I don’t think I have a single bill that is not on autopay. The only exception was the property tax on my house, until the time I made the expensive mistake of forgetting to pay it. Now the bank pays that
automatically out of escrow (from my mortgage which is also on autopay). I’m pretty sure I could fall off the face of the earth and none of my creditors would notice until my job stopped paying me and my checking account ran dry.
For someone I need to pay regularly like a cleaner I would set up a bank transfer recipient in my banking app (or website) and then payments - either one offs or regularly scheduled - are simple, instant and free.
Making change in person-to-person transactions is a pain. If I owe you $15 bucks and you and I only have 20s, there is no easy solution other than you owning me money, one of us writing off a debt, or me having to put off paying you. Much easier for me to pull out my phone, type in your phone number and the amount I want to give you and just hit send.
"something that can automatically send payments on your behalf, check that they were received, and suggest when to send extra payments"
Yes. Why not make money? So long as the revenue doesn't come from the debtor, who gives? Sure they have debt, but I mean... I still have plenty of money, a job, etc.
It's not like we're talking about making money from homeless and staving babies.
I think the "paying the bills" thing is pretty normal, at least within a certain class of folks. And it's something you can learn to work with.
I have all of my bills auto-paid. I've learned from experience -- having the power cut off, the phone cut off, the internet cut off -- that it just works better that way. I've never had a shortage of cash, but sometimes even opening the envelope with the bill inside seems oddly intimidating.
But again, you can work with that. Now everything is auto-paid; I don't even bother to open the bills. Nothing gets cut off anymore. I still get the odd annoying thing to deal with, and I've tried to get in the habbit of when there's something that I catch myself ignoring to open it immediately. I've also become a huge user of to-do tracking and set deadlines for myself -- having my daily checklist with past due things staring back at me in red works wonders. Everything goes in there. Mails to family, mails I need to respond to for business stuff (I have a hot key that creates a to-do list with a 24 hour deadline to answering a mail), stuff that needs to get done for a next release. It helps immensely.
These patterns are far too normal, especially among gifted folk for me to be willing to call them an illness and my feeling is that medicating people for these things represses some of the responsibility to build coping mechanisms that people have traditionally used to deal with this sort of thing since time immemorial. They also change your personality. If I weren't so restless when doing stuff I find boring, maybe I wouldn't have done as many interesting things? Maybe I'd still be working in a standard 9-to-5?
Surely there were smart people that had to overcome difficulty focusing before the intervention of amphetamines.
Same thing in Canada. It's called Interac Etransfer. Link your email account to a bank account, and you can send someone money for $1.50 per transaction. Made it much easier to pay back friends if you don't have exact change, or a remote landlord as I don't have to mail paper cheques and wait for confirmation.
In Canada you can email people money up to $2000 but it costs $1.50 per transfer so I tend not to use it. You can also pay most bills from large institutions online (utilities, credit cards, tuition, taxes, etc).
I've paid rent using cash, checks, and pre-authorized debit (you give them your bank account number and sign a contract and they withdraw from your account every month). For vehicles or property it's usually a certified check. Anything else goes on my credit cards.
While not quite what you asked, a service like this would at least provide an additional barrier, before someone hands over their net worth to a scammer.
The next step after that, often used for elderly people, involves a full power of attorney: someone else is completely responsible for their finances, and hands them either cash or a debit card with a small amount of money that they can use however they want. But that is for extreme cases.
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