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Comment by xerxesaa | Hacker News Reader

My strategy here is disable all auto pays and make it a manual ritual to pay my bills at the start of each calendar month.

Doing it once a month is easy enough to remember (or put a calendar invite, if you're not able to) and forces me to do a quick validation. In my 20 years of working and being independent, I've never accidentally paid for a subscription longer than one month.

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Things I don’t have on autopay frequently get shut off when I forget (or delay) paying for them.

Yeah, I'm not around or just forget to pay something. For its potential downsides, the fact that I basically don't have to think about a bunch of my ongoing billing (including essential stuff like electricity) is an admittedly first world but nonetheless big improvement over weekly write checks/mail envelopes ritual as I did for years. (Certainly there are incremental levels but I carefully evaluate new subscriptions and don't really have an issue with automatic billing.)

Yup, I've learned that lesson as well.

You go on vacation and bill pay day was in the middle of it. Or you're just busy and forget to move the calendar reminder to tomorrow. Or you get through half of them and get interrupted and forget you didn't finish.

I trust autopay far more than I trust myself!

I sort of have a compromise solution for this. I use my banks autopay whenever possible which is a push instead of a pull. That way I can just shut it off instead of finding some weird website I haven't used in a million years or call and wait on hold for 20 minutes. I started using it mostly so I didn't have to buy checks but I saw it had some advantages beyond that.

It doesn't work well with variable bills though because I can't schedule an amount I don't know yet to be paid. I'm stuck using a pull for my power bill for instance.

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