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Autopay is making us worse at managing credit-card bills

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Re: Autopay is making us worse at managing credit-card bills

#143
post #2

Not terribly surprising. The time in my life that I was most on top of my finances was when I was using the old YNAB which required manually entering all purchases and manually reconciling your account. The effort put in to keep on top of it made me hyper aware of what I was spending and where. It was great, but it takes too much effort. I don't know if better tooling could help, pointing out subscriptions and things…

Too much effort? Takes me maybe 30 mins a week. Seems like very little effort in exchange for being on top of your finances.

Having ADHD and Autism even something as simple as 30 mins a week can be a lot of effort when it isn't the thing I'm hyperfixating on.

Re: Autopay is making us worse at managing credit-card bills

#144
post #2

Not terribly surprising. The time in my life that I was most on top of my finances was when I was using the old YNAB which required manually entering all purchases and manually reconciling your account. The effort put in to keep on top of it made me hyper aware of what I was spending and where. It was great, but it takes too much effort. I don't know if better tooling could help, pointing out subscriptions and things…

I've only started using YNAB the past few years, any bank that has a Plaid connection can be automatically imported into YNAB. They still recommend period manual reconciliation to catch any import errors (which I have seen, but rarely).

Yea that is sorta what I'm talking about. The previous version didn't use Plaid and required you to manually enter everything. This forced me to be on top of it. The new Plaid version was a lot more automatic and required far less manual work, but also meant I was less involved and therefore less on top of things.

Re: Autopay is making us worse at managing credit-card bills

#145

Am I the only one using Autopay to stave off late fees in otherwise maxed out 18-21 month interest free credit cards (ie, "free" money), then paying them off in full before that grace period ends?

I agree with you, I do this too. But, it is important to understand that this is not suitable for all services. For example, I paid for a streaming service for a month and didn’t like it, and if I forgot to cancel the subscription, I would be charged more money than I wanted. There are also game services with automatic deposit replenishment, this is very dangerous for your finances. Therefore, I choose services on the https://casinosanalyzer.com/online-casino-worldwide website that are reliable and proven and I know that my money will be in order. Automatic wallet replenishment is a function that businesses use to make extra money, and I try to avoid it with this in mind.
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