Tools to managing your finance

[Anonymous]

I've always wondered how highly successfuly people manage all their CC bills, finances and any other bills. I have over 10 CCs and 3 bank accounts and have several bills.

I am tired of doing all of that manually and keeping tracking. It is taking a toll on me. Almost becoming a full time job.

How do you manage yours and make sure you dont miss any payments and is there a tool that you recommend?

Thank you v much!

[Anonymous]

The #1 recommendation you're going to get here is to embrace autopay.

[Anonymous]

The problem with autopay is, I don't know how much $ to set in auto-pay in order to manage proper utilization. E.g; if I spend $100 on one CC and my autopay on that is $110. I will end up paying $10 over. Some time the spend could be really HIGH too.

How do you fix that issue?

[rbentley]

A couple of suggestions:
1). Contact your card accounts and have them move your due dates to a uniform date. I have mine equally divided to a date 7 days past my bi-weekly pay checks.
2). Use a service like Prisim or Mint to monitor and notify you of upcoming due dates, deposits and low balances.

[iced]

My personal solution is to put any bill that can be paid via CC on a CC and set those bills to autopay. The remaining bills I also do autopay for out of checking, though in my case these types of bills are static most of the time so I know in advance how much needs to be in checking for those to clear (mortgage, car payment, and only the mortgage amount changes year to year as property taxes change).

This approach drops me from managing 7-8 monthly expenses to managing 2 cards. As a safety net, you can set up autopay for the minimum due for those rare times when you don't remember to PIF before the due date.

[Anonymous]

---

@Anonymous wrote:

The problem with autopay is, I don't know how much $ to set in auto-pay in order to manage proper utilization. E.g; if I spend $100 on one CC and my autopay on that is $110. I will end up paying $10 over. Some time the spend could be really HIGH too.

How do you fix that issue?

---

For the autopay on some cards you will have the option of paying the current balance, rather than the statement balance.  If you chose the current balance then you'd be much more likely to have your total utilization very low (e.g. 1-5%), as long as you chose statement balance on one card.

The more relevant question is why you'd want your utilization hyperlow at all times.  A very low utilization makes sense in the 40 days prior to applying for credit, but surely you are not applying for credit all the time.  Increasing your total credit limit to a reasonable level (via CLIs, etc.) plus setting your cards to PIF the statement balance should solve the problem.  You can tweak that by setting a few cards to PIF the current balance.  And finally if you spend a huge amount on one card, far more than usual, you'll know that and can simply make one manual payment.

[Priory_Man]

Autopay set to "pay statement balance" 15 days after close.
If I for some reason have to make a big purchase I will edit my autopay for that card for one month only to a "custom amount".

[Anonymous]

I've been thinking about giving mint.com a try. How has your experience been with them? 

[rbentley]

Mint is good.  I prefer Prisim just because of the interface and the ease of paying from there.  It really is a matter of personal preference.  Both do the same job.

[Anonymous]

1. All bills that can be paid by CC is set to autopay from CCs. Car, dental, health insurance ...etc..

2. All bills that can't be paid by CC is set to autopay from one of my checking accounts. Mortgage, utility, water/sewer...etc..

3. All bills that doesn't accept autopay is paid by auto billpay from checking, I only have one, homeowner association fee.

4. (Optional) Assuming you have some savings put away, setup a high yield checking account that pays 3-5% APY up to a maximum cap (ie 10k-30k) with some monthly requirements (ie debit card transactions), use this checking account as your payment account for all your CCs. Since this account will always have a balance close to the maximum cap, it removes the possibility of insufficient funds/returned payment and eliminates the need to scramble funds from savings to checking prior to CC autopays. The 2 accounts I recommend are WyHy FCU (15k/12 debit) and Orion FCU (30k/8 debits).

5. Set all CCs on autopay to pay the full statement balance on or before due date pulling from the rewards checking above (or regular checking), you can still make extra manual payments on top of the autopay if you wish/need (micromanage UTI before credit app/large purchases...etc.), most autopay systems are smart enough to automatically adjust autopay based on manual payments but there are some exceptions where autopay will still pull the statement balance after manual payments, you will need to either adjust autopay (ie CapOne) or cancel autopay then reset autopay after making manual payments (ie PenFed).

6. Like already suggested above, money management software will help greatly in monitoring all accounts if you have a lot of CCs and deposit accounts, I use Mint, it gives me realtime monitoring of all CC/deposit account transactions.