After recently forgetting to pay a couple of my credit card monthly payments, I think I need to get a automatic payment service of some kind (since the credit card companies don't seem to offer it for obvious reasons). However, the only one I have found so far that seems to be reputable is MSN Bill Pay. However, they ask for a Social Security number and I don't really feel they need it. Are there other ones you might suggest?

You don't have Direct Debit in the US?

If its a credit card payment then just mark it off on your calendar no?

I just want it automatic just in case I forget.....Plus, the date varies every month too (I think they do that part on purpose

I've seen Bill Pay quite a bit, but never looked into it. Do they have automatic payments by chance?

Check the online services provided by your bank.

I can check account activity, move funds between accounts, pay bills, and also set up bill payment schedules.
Of course, the continuously scheduled payments are set to a predetermined amount- good for rent and loan payments, but maybe not for credit cards.

Still, a small automatic payment might keep you from being charged a late fee.

Have you tried your bank's online banking offerings? You might want to consider a different credit card, too. The cards I've had (and banks I've used, for that matter) have all offered auto-payment.

It's probably worth checking with them. Here in the UK my credit card issuer stopped listing direct debit in their "how to pay this bill" section a while ago, but they do still offer the service if you ring up and ask.

Peter

I second the recommendation of hooking up with your bank's online bill paying features.

I do 100 percent of my bill paying with my bank's online features now. Whether the bank pays electronically or via paper, it doesn't matter, it's all just handled at their end. I opt for still receiving paper statements from all of my services because I like having the records, but I can still *pay* them online.

Paying bills and balancing my accounts is now a 30-minute procedure that I perform twice a month, instead of the gigantic hours-long hassle it used to be, back when I was a lad. I haven't licked a stamp or sealed an envelope in years.

And with the kind of account I've got with my bank, the bill pay feature is free. I had to do some slight modifications to my account to *make* it free (only certain classes of accounts have free bill-pay), but I was OK with those changes.

Edit: One thing that I don't do is have the services automatically *withdraw* their payments from me. It's an option with most of them, and it would certainly solve the specific problem you initially posted, so look into it and see if it's what you like. Me, I prefer to be the one who decides when they get paid.

I don't think I've paid a bill OFFLINE since early 1995.

I have 5 online banking accounts with 5 different banks and they all offer payment and transfer scheduling. I don't have deposit accounts with all 5 of the banks though. The interfaces and abilities vary, but they can all be set at least to a specific date each month with a specific amount for the payment. Generally I can also specify whether the schedule will repeat perpetually or occur a specific number of times instead.

One thing about bank BillPay features: I've had some banks that will actually connect to your billers and find what amount you owe and show it to you on the bank's BillPay page. Other banks don't seem to have that feature. It's a nice feature that I wish I had with my current bank, but so many other things are nice that I'm willing to overlook this one.

Ah. I manually pay my credit card bill but I do it electronically. I've set up a monthly standing order however that will always pay £10 in so I don't ever get the late payment fines or nasty letters. Its just to cover any times when I forget to pay in time.

My bank automatically transfers exact funds from my savings account to pay the CC bill in full each month.

Years ago, I asked for this, and they said, "Huh?".

Then, perhaps five years ago, they began nearly demanding that their customers sign up for this (free) new service.

Weird.

Cheers

Man, if only my credit card bills were that small!

Hah. I wish. Thats just the minimum payment! I normally pay it off fully every month but because I'm doing it manually then I might forget.

I meant, if only my minimum payments were that small.

I used to use Chase's online bill payment (via Quicken) and liked it up until a few years ago. Originally, I'd pay a bill and, when necessary, a check would be printed and mailed. For clueful payees, the whole transaction would be paperless. Cash never left my bank account until the check cleared. Then Chase changed things around. Now, they take the money out of your account in advance, whether or not the payee ever receives the check. That means, if you're paying your credit card bill, you're basically giving the bank several days of additional "float" on your money with zero interest. In one case, where I paid a bill that required a check to be printed, to my gardener, he never got it but the money was absent from my account. Cleaning that up was annoying.

I've since switched to Fidelity's BillPay. It's all online, through their web site, and free of any fees (minimum balance requirements, etc.). This works how you would expect. The money is in your account, earning you interest, up to the minute that the payment clears. BillPay also knows how to present you with your bills (either showing you HTML inline, with some vendors, or linking you out to a vendor's web site, for others), email you when a new bill has arrived, etc. It's about as painless as you could possibly want. About the only problem I've found is that it doesn't load properly on an iPhone. Yet. They're clearly working on an iPhone-specific front-end for Fidelity. It works in parts and fails in other parts.

Well, to be fair, Canadian banks are generally miles (err... kilometers?) ahead of their US counterparts when it comes to advances in, and introduction of, new technology.

I would think whatever bank you have an account at would offer that. Wells Fargo does I know TCF did too.

WF does, but it's kind of wonky.

On the other hand WF does allow one to make payments directly to any other WF account holder. A feature I found handy to receive payment for a recent ebay sale.

That's neat I didn't know you could do that. What info do you have to exchange to make the transfer ?

I use the Wells Fargo "transfer to another wells Fargo user" feature every month.

The info you need to supply is:

Account name of other user. (Person's correct first and last name).
Account number of other user.
Your ATM PIN.
Which account to send the money from.
How much (up to 1000.00).
Description ( optional ).

But we're still at least 10 or more years behind Europe in ATM technology rollout.

In Canada you can send money online (up to a maximum of $5000 for some banks) via email. All you need is the email address of the person you're sending the money to. You don't need their name or accounts or anything else (having someone else's account is a security concern after all).

Basically you create a secret question (free-form text) and answer (also free-form). The question gets sent with the email notification. When the recipient visits the link provided in the email they first choose their bank from a list and then are presented with the question after logging in. If they don't provide the correct answer they can't claim the funds. Ideally you'd have provided them with the answer by phone or in person, not via another email.

The fee is usually the same as a third-party ATM withdrawal, $1.50. Canada is king of service charges as far as I know. There's only one single "bank" that I know of right now where you can have a chequing account that doesn't cost you money every month, even if you don't use it.

My bank is a small, non-franchise bank (that is, not like Wells Fargo or Bank of America) in Fairbanks, Alaska. Even though I am now living in California (and next year in Mexico) I am keeping them as my bank. They are very much customer oriented. They know me personally, I can send them an email and they will do a $10,000 wire transfer (without any service charges) to Carlos' bank in Mexico. There are no fees for checks, they pay interest (minimal) on my checking account, money orders are free, etc. There is no problem setting up autopay for any repetitive bill.

They're a small bank, but their service is large.

tanstaafl.

Out of curiosity, does anyone have a bank that actually allows you to do bill payment from your financial application (Quicken, Money, etc.)?

Wells Fargo did but I haven't used it for a while so I don't know if they still do. There was a few dollar fee of course.

Chase Bank lets you do payments from Quicken. But, as I mentioned above, they do it in a funny way. You also pay $5/month or so for the "convenience" of it.

You mean the taking the money out when the check is written? My bank does that now, too. I thought it was part of the Check 21 Act regulations that were put into effect late 2004, but I can't seem to find any reference to that now.

For starters, How much is in your account?

Ditto. It's what I always did in the UK and in the US I've attempted to do the same. Two out of three of my card providers (HSBC and Chase aka United Airlines) do offer the service - ie pay the bill in full at the latest date possible without penalty, but CapitalOne don't. Hence, I no longer use their card - only got it because they actually offered me a card just after I arrived...

Hugo

I've been impressed by the new Faster Payments service in the UK. It's always been possible to send money to other accounts at any bank just by entering the name, account, sort code and amount on the online account service, but it's taken 3-4 days. I've recently been sent a few payments and they have arrived in the time it's taken me to login to my account to check if it has arrived. Apparently the banks were considering charging for the "service", but I haven't heard about any actually doing this.

I read over the FAQ on Check 21, and it doesn't say anything about this practice. The goal of Check 21, as I understand it, was to make things more efficient by allowing banks to scan paper checks and then pass the scans around electronically, thus accelerating the process and cutting the costs of check handling. There's no reason why a bank has to take the money out of your account when you write the check. The money should stay there until the other side claims it and then it's transferred.

With electronic payees (as for all my major utility bills and such), there's very little latency for this, so it doesn't matter. For checks that are printed and stuffed into envelopes, that latency is a much bigger deal.

Like I said, I couldn't find any current reference to it. But I distinctly remember that change happening at the same time. Maybe it was just a coverup. In all honesty, unless you have an interest-bearing checking account, it doesn't really make any difference. The bank is making money on your money regardless of whether it's in your account or not. And I'm not aware of any checking account that gives any significant interest. I know mine basically just covers my monthly fee.

Hey, how dare you criticize the interest practices of my bank. Why, they're giving me a whole one third of one percent annual interest on my checking account. Over the course of a year, that'll give me enough money to go on vacation -- provided my vacation is no further away than I can drive on 8/10 of a gallon of gasoline, that is...

tanstaafl.

I'm getting three-quarters of a percent! I win!!

It's not so much the low interest that honks me off, it's the money-in-limbo that gets me annoyed. I have a money market account that gets better rates than my checking account. I used to transfer money from the money market to the checking account then pay my bills from that. The way Chase rigged it, I had to move the money in sooner, since they insisted on taking the money out three days prior to a scheduled payment. To add insult to injury, if I made a large deposit, they would randomly decide to place a hold on the money without indicating this in any way that I could deduce, causing a transfer in the other way, at one point, to mysteriously fail.

What's crazy is that, with the modern "paperless" check clearing infrastructure, none of this is necessary. Money moves instantly, so why have holds and delays and all of that? The only reason I can imagine is that Chase is trying to increase their "float" on your money.

Wells Fargo does the hold on large deposits also. I don't remember the amount that is the limit, but they deposit 50% and then wait like four or five (working) days to deposit the rest. It is really annoying.

Does anybody still use credit unions? From the intest rates I've seen quoted here, my credit union has a lot higher rate.

My bank is a credit union. On their standard savings account, the interest is currently 1.75%, and the money market is 3.25%. It's just the checking account that's only 0.75%