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
#2Not 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 like that so you can easily check if you are still using it and cancelling. How do we fix this without requiring everyone to manually keep a checkbook.
Re: Autopay is making us worse at managing credit-card bills
#3The dark patterns around auto-pay are part of the problem.
One that bit me a couple of times this year was my bank's offering the ability to set an auto-pay limit.
Which you would think means "auto-pay the lesser of the account balance or the specified limit," to help smooth out payments for a larger purchase.
But instead it means, "short-circuit auto-pay if the account balance rises above the limit." It's easy to miss the notification about this, which blends in with other emails from the bank. Voila, late charge!
Re: Autopay is making us worse at managing credit-card bills
#4Re: Autopay is making us worse at managing credit-card bills
#5The first thing I do for any credit card is enroll in autopay. You can always make additional payments and pay off in full, but late fees and late payments are arguably more disastrous for your long-term credit than accruing interest for a cycle.
Re: Autopay is making us worse at managing credit-card bills
#6I don't know what it is, but autopay causes me so much mental load. Instead I go over my bills every two weeks, following the tune of my paycheck.
Every two weeks I check all credit cards, pay my mortgage, utilities, etc.
Re: Autopay is making us worse at managing credit-card bills
#7One thing that has really helped me is that you can set up the Apple Card so that it sends a notification to your phone for _every single purchase_, whether one-off or recurring. Of course you can turn this off if it annoys you, but I have found it's good to leave it on: it makes CC purchases "hurt" like spending cash does, and occasionally reminds me of recurring costs I would otherwise have forgotten.
Probably other cards let you do this as well, although I'm guessing they don't make it as frictionless as Apple's does (where IIRC it's the default), because it's not in the interest of other CC providers for you to be noisily reminded every time you spend money.
Re: Autopay is making us worse at managing credit-card bills
#8One thing that has really helped me is that you can set up the Apple Card so that it sends a notification to your phone for _every single purchase_, whether one-off or recurring. Of course you can turn this off if it annoys you, but I have found it's good to leave it on: it makes CC purchases "hurt" like spending cash does, and occasionally reminds me of recurring costs I would otherwise have forgotten. Probably othe…
You can usually have it set to send you a notification if it goes over a certain amount so set it to the lowest like $1 for most cards
Re: Autopay is making us worse at managing credit-card bills
#9I wonder who they mean by "we"?
Re: Autopay is making us worse at managing credit-card bills
#10Everytime I set some new bill such as the mortgage, insurance or utility on autopay I add it to the total in my head and consider that amount as already gone each month. Then I just never think about it again. However, I always make sure anything on autopay is the maximum owed amount per month to never accrue any interest.
Then I consider credit payments the same as debit payments. The money is just gone as soon as I pay for an item.