How do you pay your bills? I put my phone bills on the credit card initially. They gave a small discount for that. They then changed to debit card to give discount. Now, they insist on a direct pay from the checking account. I’d rather pay bills old way, just write a check, now echeck. What is the difference paying with a debit card and paying directly from the bank account?
Some are autopay on the cc, some are autopay out of our checking account, some I still write and mail a check.
Different methods have different costs to the payee. Payees may give incentives to use methods that cost them less (a common example is cash versus credit prices at fuel stations).
I have all my bills paying from my checking account using autopay and paperless billing. I had used credit or debit cards in the past, but nobody accepts them for automatic payments anymore.
The same happened to my daughter. All of the companies who used to let her auto-change to credit or debit cards switched to requiring a checking account instead.
The only bill anybody in the family pays with a check, is my daughter’s rent which she mails to her landlord (a person not a company) each month.
Ours are all autopay, either by CC or bank account, and have been for years. Especially now that we split our time between two places, we can’t rely on mail forwarding to get paper bills to us with sufficient leeway to pay on time. We have a checkbook (somewhere), but I doubt we write more than five or six checks a year, mostly for one-off home services.
Although a debit card doesn’t have to be associated with a Visa or MC account, most are and most banks or Credit Unions give benefits for those (hold if amount is disputed, stolen card has no charge to the account), and that costs the bank money and the merchant money, so they pass that on or don’t allow it. If the money comes out as an ACH directly to the checking account, then the bank eats it.
I don’t think I can set up withdrawals from my savings account as there is a limit of 6 transfers a month from savings, 3 from high yield savings.
I pay most bills by account transfer from checking (Xcel, Tmobile, chase credit cards, water, trash…). I could pay by mailed check but then I’d have to buy checks and stamps.
All bills are on autopay. I prefer for autopay to be paid with credit cards due to a combination of the cashback and increased simplicity. However, water and HOA make it more financially advantageous to autopay with bank, rather than CC. My credit cards are paid automatically from my Fidelity account, which serves as my primary bank. My Fidelity account stores cash for bill pay in FDLXX (4% yield, state/local tax exempt).
All of our regular bills are on autopay (from checking account or on Visa). We used to do more on Visa autopay in order to get more frequent flier miles, but over time more are paid from checking acct due to incentives and sometimes new billing rules.
I pay all my bills through my bank account. Those not on auto pay, I pay through the banks bill pay. This includes those bills where you “ have to write a check” like lawn service. Chase will send a paper check through the mail for you. I can’t imagine writing a check ever again.
Everything that can be autopay is, either directly from checking or the cc.
Bills that aren’t auto:
Our utility bill. No way to do that automatically. At least they will take an online payment with cc now.
Our personal property taxes and real estate tax are also done by check. Even more annoying is that they split the cars two ways, so I must write 6 checks a year for that. Recently they added an online cc option, but with a 3% fee. Nope. A stamp is cheaper.
Doctors. Most only accept checks in the mail or in person. The dermatologist used to do online payments, but now you can only view it online and then have to write them a check.
Contractors. Either checks or cash. Never heard of anyone using credit cards for that or Venmo.
I had to write 2 checks recently. One for our wills, the lawyer didn’t accept credit cards
The other for a medical bill because the billing service wanted me to set up an account. I wasn’t going to go through all the steps and have yet another password so it was easier to write a check.
Other than that, autopay. I do transfer money for my main credit card because I like to be on top of what we charge every month.
I like autopay, it does make the thought of changing banks daunting, I don’t even know how to change the autopay on the mortgage. Which is at 3% and I’m riding that out to the bitter end
I have everything on some form of autopay - either automatically taken from my checking account every month (utilities), or pay with a click or two online for credit cards.
When my daughter recently got married, I had to write a bunch of checks for the venue and catering because they did not do online billing. It was inconvenient.
I sometimes write checks for tradespeople since the ones I deal with still require checks. They all say they are transitioning to online billing but it will take them some time. I also pay property taxes by check.
After some initial resistance on my part, I love it. It only took a time or two of missing a bill in the mail and getting a late fee (easily reversed) for me to realize getting a bill and paying it online was the way to go for me. On the plus side, most of my mail is junk mail these days lol.
When you all say “autopay,” do you mean that whatever the balance is is automatically debited from your account on the approrpiate day? Or do you just mean “e-pay,” which IMO is way safer. I pay almost everything straight from the checking account but only after I’ve looked at the bill and OK’ed it. For example, I wouldn’t want my credit card bill to be autopaid, since the total varies and some items on the bill may be errors that I’d want to dispute.
Everything is autopaid, whatever the balance. For any vendor that cannot be set up for autopay (our lawn service for example), I simply pay using the bank’s online billpay feature where the bank sends the vendor a check for whatever amount I specify. Perfectly safe, never had a dispute in all these years.
I saw a situation where unwinding autopay after death of loved one was a chore, especially bc paper bills were not sent… the deceased’s pension stopped but the household autopays continued…
It was not enough that the bank account was closed. Each account being autopaid had to be contacted with death certificate.
Our bank credit cards are on autopay (like most bills), I get an email notification before they’re paid and I check the charges (I actually get an email for every charge but don’t always catch it).
Autopay - where the bill is automatically deducted from checking or cc on the appropriate day.
But every month, I do what I’ve always done. At the end of the month (when we get paid), I get out the checkbook, write in the deposits, go through all the bills and write them in the checkbook, subtract, and that’s what I have “left to live on” for the month. Though I pretty much put everything on cc now. But I also update my “what to do when I die file” then as well.
So that’s when I go through the cc bills and everything just like I would have before. And I also have the cc notify me every time a charge is used do I also check it in real time. What used to take me 2 hours each month, now takes 30 min.
And when I die? In my file I have a matrix of exactly which bills get deducted from which account or cc and when. I have listed the monthly bills, the quarterly or odd times bills, and also the yearly subscription/bills all listed out. Edit - and the username & passwords are in that file too
Mostly autopay. The remaining are online banking payments. We still have a couple of vendors who want checks (our landscaper, and we will do anything he wants to keep him).
I use a combination of methods. I still write some checks, but I want to set those up for bank bill pay. I refuse to pay extra to pay a bill by credit or debit card. I’m trying to simplify things so that if I get hit by a bus, I don’t have to worry whether things get paid while I recover.
That’s basically why I started my file, except in case of death. But on page 1 after our SSNs and driver license numbers, I have in big bold red letters the following…
Make sure you figure out what to do with H’s health insurance, because if I die, that goes away, and it wouldn’t occur to him that this would happen.
And second - make sure there is enough in the checking account to cover the bills. See page X for all the auto deducts. It wouldn’t occur to H to think about this either.