Trust Autopay?

[Anonymous]

I decided to restructure how I pay my credit cards in keeping with my "use it like a debit card" ways... This restructure should help maximize earnings, but depends on credit card autopays and I've never used them, had them setup just-incase, but never actually let it hit before.

Little background: TL;DR at bottom.
Decided, why not earn a tiny (insignificant!) amount of interest on my payments? I also figured this will help me keep a better tab on what I actually have, and technically never "owe". Since Discover allows you to have any number of savings accounts, I created and labeled one for each credit card (since their rate is higher than Ally for now). Any time I make a purchase, at the end of the day total everything up and use google pay to transfer from my main checking, to Discover checking, then distribute per-card to their respective savings accounts. This ensures all purchases are accounted for, and already budgeted from the main account. During float time, it should earn interest (2.10% as of writing).

This also guarantees that the payments are already set aside. When the statement rolls, I transfer just the statement amount (leaving any pending) to my Ally checking (via google pay again, which should earn another 1% as a 'purchase'). Then the statement amount sits in my ally account earning another measly (as of writing) 0.10% during the grace period. This does, however, again guarantees all cards are covered. I setup the Ally checking account as the autopay for all said credit cards and they pull their respective payments from the "statement pool" of cash.

TL;DR starts here:
So my question to you, is do any of you trust the credit card auto-pay system? Specifically I'm asking (as of right now) about US Bank, Discover, and Synchrony/Paypal. Discover and US Bank I can manually set the day and set it to 2 days prior to the due date for safety, Synchrony does not allow this, so I'm a little jittery about it.

Please share your experiences with autopay for US Bank, Discover, and Synchrony (specifically Cashback MC). "Trust" a credit card company... heh.

Edit: Removed a bunch of  ... Why do those get stuffed in randomly?

[Anonymous]

Every single credit card, student loan, and auto loan I own is on auto pay. I don't trust myself not to forget and either way, each credit card is going to get paid. 

[Anonymous]

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@Anonymous wrote:

Every single credit card, student loan, and auto loan I own is on auto pay. I don't trust myself not to forget and either way, each credit card is going to get paid. 

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Guess if they have the system it has to work else they'd get major complaints. I'm a hawk on my finances so it's not like I'll forget. I'm just a bit skittish when it comes to depending on automated systems.

[blindambition]

I don’t do Auto Pay. I had a nightmare scenario once. Luckily it didn’t cause me a credit issue. I just set myself notifications when to pay. This works for me. With that said; I know many use AutoPay with no issue.

Your scenario has too many working pieces where something can go wrong. That’s just my opinion. Not against the AutoPay, but might want to simplify that setup.

[Anonymous]

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@blindambition wrote:

I don’t do Auto Pay. I had a nightmare scenario once. Luckily it didn’t cause me a credit issue. I just set myself notifications when to pay. This works for me. With that said; I know many use AutoPay with no issue.

Your scenario has too many working pieces where something can go wrong. That’s just my opinion. Not against the AutoPay, but might want to simplify that setup.

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It's not as complex as it sounds. Verses my current setup where I push payments weekly, I instead transfer the payments to a dedicated savings account to gain a touch of interest before the autopay hits  I could simply set a reminder and do the payments manually, but that adds extra steps. What would you suggest to simplify it?

[Anonymous]

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@Anonymous wrote:

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@Anonymous wrote:

Every single credit card, student loan, and auto loan I own is on auto pay. I don't trust myself not to forget and either way, each credit card is going to get paid. 

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Guess if they have the system it has to work else they'd get major complaints. I'm a hawk on my finances so it's not like I'll forget. I'm just a bit skittish when it comes to depending on automated systems.

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+1 I don't trust auto pay enough to rely on it.  I choose to pay manually and do it ahead of the due date.  I utilize a calendar as a reminder.  Manually paying my bills forces me to look at my statements and be on-top of everything with the finances should I need to catch something off. 

I've seen where auto pay has failed and caused more issues with failing, double-pulling and not paying from the correct payment account.  I'd rather own my accountability to the finances.  The only thing I do use auto pay with is auto insurance, which we pay in full every 6 months.  My bills are simple and don't require a lot of micro-management.   I can see where auto pay is useful to those with a lot of accounts and little time to manage.

[Remedios]

I almost missed a payment because I forgot about quarterly recurring charge

Since then, all my cards are set to pay minimum payment on due date as a precautionary measure, but they get paid before. 

I did not "trust" autopay prior to this *almost incident* and I thought it could never happen to me. 

[blindambition]

Hasselfree hit the nail on the head. I’ve seen double pulls, and pulling from wrong account. I wouldn’t use multiple accounts to pull from. Too many variables not in your favor with that setup.

[Anonymous]

Hm, people seem to be confused a little with stating pull from multiple accounts. All the shuffling is done by me. Only ONE account is setup as the autopay account. All my cards have just the one account listed on them and I'll be self directing cash into said account to monitor. The multi-account play is all managed by me manually. I will probably pay things manually from said account, just wondering if autopay is a good safetynet. The account is already setup with billpay to push payments to all the cards. Not going to entirely depend on autopay.

[calyx]

Trust but verify:

I have auto payments set up on all of my accounts, but I stay on top of them when I'm first starting out with a bank.
I like that most of them will let me do a statement balance well before the due date, except for synchrony which only allows me to do autopay on the due date, which makes me a wee bit nervous. 

I get paid once/month, so I have recently gotten in the habit of just paying everything when my payday hits, but have the autopay set up still (just in case).   My only snafu has been USBank, which will pull my autopay payment even though I've already paid the balance off.   So I have a weird alternating thing with them where I push, they autopull in month 1, I do nothing month 2 (since the negative is already there - it's a recurring charge), and then in month three I forget all over again and we loop to the overpayment.

I can't think of a single (regular) bill that I don't have on autopay.