Day 12 Of 30 Days Of Stay-At-Home Personal Finance Wins: Automate Bill Payments

3 minute read

What if you were able to come out of this time of social distancing and economic crisis with a stronger and healthier financial life? What if you looked at this as an opportunity to take a little bit of your extra time each day to work on your finances?

Since it takes me about 35 minutes to drive to work in the morning and 45 minutes on the way back home, I have an extra 1 hour and 20 minutes of my day that I don’t have to drive while I’m working from home that I can use to accomplish something. This doesn’t even take into consideration all of the networking and social events that would usually take up some of my time throughout the week.

Obviously, your situation is different than mine (and probably a whole lot different if you have kids at home who would otherwise be in daycare), but I’m guessing that we all have at least a little extra time right now that we can dedicate to our personal finances.

It looks like we’re going to continue to practice our social distancing skills at least through April, and now is a great time to work on creating a better financial situation, so I’m giving you 30 days of stay-at-home personal finance wins throughout April.

Unfortunately, I understand that there are many who have (and who will) lose their jobs during this time of uncertainty and objectively will not come out on the other side of this with a stronger financial situation. Hopefully, many of these personal finance wins can help to lessen the blow and make things easier on them. On the other hand, I think that many of these wins are still relevant to those who are fortunate enough to be in a position to not have to worry about their job and their finances to help them build a healthier financial life.

Day 12: Automate Bill Payments

Yep, you get to log back into your accounts again for today’s win. But, since you’ve been cleaning things up over the past couple of days this should be a little bit easier than it would have been before because you’ve gotten rid of some expenses. We all have a lot of bills to pay and they can all be due on different frequencies such as monthly, quarterly, or annually which can cause unnecessary complexity to our personal finances.

Expenses that are paid monthly like your mortgage/rent and utilities are easy to remember, but other expenses like insurance premiums or annual memberships may be paid less frequently and may be harder to remember. No matter the frequency of payments, you could benefit from making them automatic so that you don’t miss them and end up being charged late fees or interest on a credit card balance.

Don’t Become Complacent

I think that automating your payments can be a double-edged sword in that doing so makes your life easier and helps to make sure that you’re not paying unnecessary charges, but it can also help you to become comfortable and not put consideration into how much and why you’re paying each bill. As I mentioned yesterday, there are many subscriptions and memberships that people pay for but don’t use. Those companies have intentionally built an automatic payment model so that people will be less likely to cancel them.

Bill Pay

Bill pay is a feature that many banks offer through their online accounts where you can enter the billing information of each company that you make frequent payments to so that they will be made directly by the bank rather than you entering your financial information into each company’s login. This protects you because it means that you don’t have your financial information within each company’s system. Bill pay can also save you some time by not having to login to each company’s online portal every time you need to schedule a payment.

Automating payments, whether using the billing company’s automatic payment method or setting up bill pay through your bank, can help you to save time, money, and stress.