This past week, I took the step of automating the payment on my American Express credit card. After a year and a half of doing this manually, I have now automated my entire expenses:
- My utilities to Puget Sound Energy are paid automatically through their website.
- My car insurance is charged to my credit card automatically.
- My cell phone bill is charged to my credit card automatically.
- Netflix bills me automatically.
- Through Bill Payment at the bank, my Internet is paid automatically each month.
- Through Bill Payment at the bank, my mortgage is paid automatically each month.
- Through Bill Payment at the bank, my Homeowner Association dues are paid automatically each month.
- Like most people, I have auto-deductions to my 401(k) each month taken off my paycheck.
For the longest time, I resisted doing automatic payment on any of my bills. I paid some of it online and the rest by check, but after a while I figured “Hey, why not automate the payment of all recurring bills? I’m just going to pay it anyway.” That, and a couple of times I would forget to pay a bill and get a notice saying “You dope, pay your bills!”
I added everything to do it without my intervention except for my credit card. I still wanted to do that manually. But I took the step this week of doing it because I review my spending regularly, either through Mint or through the Amex website. I give the spending a quick review and then proceed to okay it.
There’s a chance now that I might have a bad payment on my card that I wouldn’t catch now. But my theory is that if Amex (or any of these services) had bad payment systems, they would show up everywhere and plenty of other people would be complaining. In other words, a popular service has probably got the important bugs worked out.
When I finally finished this off, I boasted to the wife “Everything’s automated now!” She wasn’t really all that impressed; then again, she is like how I was before and pays everything online (mostly) but doesn’t want to automate (on the other hand, I can’t even convince her to deposit money in her bank account through an ATM; using a human teller isn’t required).
The best part of doing this automatically is that I don’t have to remember to pay everything, I just need to review my spending periodically. And I review it all the time these days, so there’s little concern to me that something bad is happening.
The only thing I wish I could do automatically is trade stocks. I switched back to my lazy portfolio, and I wish there was a way I could deposit money into my account each month and then when the spare cash reaches a certain amount, buy xx shares of one stock, yy shares of another, and so forth. I can’t do that yet which is unfortunate.
But at least everything else is on autopilot.
Read Full Post »