The Money Mustache Community

Learning, Sharing, and Teaching => Ask a Mustachian => Topic started by: hamildub on May 12, 2015, 12:55:04 PM

Title: Bill Payments
Post by: hamildub on May 12, 2015, 12:55:04 PM
I enter all my bills as they come in the mail. It's kind of a pain in the ass but I really don't trust the cable company et al to set up auto payments. I recently got a travel reward card and if I can get points for paying bills I'd be pretty happy.

What do you do for your bills?
Title: Re: Bill Payments
Post by: MDM on May 12, 2015, 01:04:48 PM
Auto-pay everything.
Title: Re: Bill Payments
Post by: RexualChocolate on May 12, 2015, 01:06:45 PM
Bills in the mail? What is this, 1985?

Sign up for e bills. Pay everything online with online banking. You can even set up e bills so that your online bank can show you how much you owe for each bill, but I just use email and "last payment date" to track.

Only bill I can pay with a credit card for free is my Verizon phone bill (covered by company, otherwise it'd be a cheaper company). Otherwise CC fee outweighs the points.

10000% agree with NEVER setting up autopay. Giving someone ACH authority on your bank account can be a disaster- with debit transactions they have your money and you get to fight to get it back versus the other way around.
Title: Re: Bill Payments
Post by: NotJen on May 12, 2015, 01:29:42 PM
I don't do autopay. It's not an issue of trust, I just like to be in complete control of how/when/where the money is coming from. And it helps me to be alert of billing errors, and know just how much things cost.

When I get my bill in the mail (yep), I go online to the service provider's website and pay with my credit card. If they charge a fee for credit cards, I use my bank's free bill pay (for utilities).
Title: Re: Bill Payments
Post by: firewalker on May 12, 2015, 01:36:49 PM
To much of a headache paying bills? Cut back on services! No cable = no bill = no headache! No Netflix = no bill = no headache! Repeat.
Title: Re: Bill Payments
Post by: nobody123 on May 12, 2015, 01:52:00 PM
I have everything that I can set to auto-pay set up to do so, but I still get the paper statements because I use them as a reminder to see if there was some sort of billing error.  The paper bills usually have some sort of wording like "Set up to auto-pay, do not send payment". 

I have it charge my credit card as long as there is no "convenience fee" to get the cash back rewards*.  My mortgage only lets me do ACH, but's a fixed amount each month until they annually adjust my escrow, so I have no issue with it.  I do have two utilities stuck in the dark ages, one that still only accepts a check via snail mail (I use my bank's online bill pay to mail them a check for free) and one that accepts a credit card but won't do auto-pay.

* The school system uses a debit system for school lunches - no cash allowed.  I can either send in a check in with my kid, hope it gets to the office, and is applied to his account in a timely fashion, or pay a $3.50 convenience fee to have it charge my CC.  I figure the $3.50 a handful of times per year is a small price to pay to not have to deal with the multiple points of failure involved with handing a first grader a check.
Title: Re: Bill Payments
Post by: Frankies Girl on May 12, 2015, 02:13:20 PM
I have very few options to pay bills by card, but do try to set up as much as possible to earn the rewards. As long as it doesn't charge a fee, I'm fine with using the card.


I have everything set to e-bill me, but I still pay everything myself online. I don't like autopay. I like seeing how much I'm paying out each month and can catch any weirdness pretty fast that way, but mostly I still think it's a good idea to have the ritual of sitting down and devoting a few minutes of time to bill paying so I am not just letting money come in and go out without thinking about the process.

When a bill comes in by email, I star it as a reminder. I then sit down twice a month (every other Friday) with my bill notebook and check my starred emails -  enter the bill, amount paid, due date and date paid. I then go pay the bills due through my bank's website.

I do use Mint to track bills and spending in general, but the notebook has been an easy way for me or the husband to check stuff immediately since he gets emails on some bills and I get some others, and it literally takes me 10 minutes. It's both a tracker and a reminder. I can make notes of what I spent (if the amounts are higher than usual), double check that all bills came in and see if there are any increase/decreases compared to last month or year by flipping through a few pages.

We have one bill that still comes by mail and can't be set up to be emailed, but we can fortunately pay it online. We just lay that bill on the notebook so that it's there ready to be entered when it is time to pay bills.

Title: Re: Bill Payments
Post by: Lis on May 12, 2015, 03:18:39 PM
I dislike autopay - the only thing I have set up that way is Netflix, which is a paltry $8 a month and is paid via CC. I (purposely) keep very little in my checking account. On the first of the month, I transfer whatever I spent on my CCs to my checking account, and everything is paid off on the second. The second day is more of a buffer and allows me to a) double check to make sure I did the math correctly and b) review what I spent and why I spent it, making sure I stayed on budget. I can honestly say I have no idea when my due dates are for my credit cards - whatever the posted amount is on the first gets transferred from my savings account and paid the next day.