I thought it was great until I watched someone get buried in fees by it. They forgot about the automatic payment while dealing with the crisis that used up all their money.

They sorted through the fees and got things turned back on by explaining the situation, but it was a nightmare. Precarity is hard to understand if you've never been in or near it, or if it's a distant memory for you. It's overwhelming on a good day.

It seems VERY unlikely they forgot that they didn't have to pay rent all of a sudden?

The way it works fore me here in the EU is that bills land in my bank account and I log in on mobile, select the ones I want to confirm, and sign the transfer.

We also have bank to bank instant transfers for free (useful for paying back 1/2 pizza etc) without external private middlemen. US banking feels so legacy, much more so than the COBOL I work on.

U.S. banking is not as bad as some make it out to be. Every bank I've delt with offers the same things you describe. Here, it is less dependent on the bank and more dependent on the biller. All my credit cards (even those from other banks) offer ebilling, and bills are visible in my online banking each month. Utilities like electric and internet, medical providers, etc., generally don't. But I can pay them all through the bank anyway, and I don't have to worry how it happens; the bank chooses ACH or they mail a bank check. Either way, I know exactly when it will clear, and exactly how much it will cost me: $0. I can also use the bank's mobile app to send money from person to person, instantly and with no fee.

Well, there certainly are banks in the US that don't, and why are apps like Venmo a thing over there if the same thing can be done already? =/

I guess it's because of the bank you chose, since the one my relatives use don't have any of that, and are those apps bank-specific? Do people not having your bank also receive the money instantly?

Most of the medium to large banks have that option. Many partner with Zelle because it is not bank specific, though I once had a credit union account that let me do ACH transfers to other accounts. But as you point out, there's also PayPal and Venmo. My Amex lets me split purchases by calculating the portion and sending PayPal or Venmo requests on my behalf. I think the largest difference may be that there's no one way to do a thing, while at least to me as an outsider, it feels like Europe has One True Way.

It happens like this: you can pay rent without penalty up to say, the fifth of the month. Auto pay is set to come out of your account on the first. Sometimes you need the extra few days to get everything in line, but because everything is so tight and hectic, you forget that you won't actually get to flex those few days, and the payment comes out earlier than you expected.

The timing of payments can be a real burden when you're on the edge. I wrote about a time something similar happened to me a few years back https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6424493 This is about overdraft fees, specifically, but it's the same principle.

If you're living on the edge like that you shouldn't be using autopay.

This whole branch started with me explaining to nabla9 why some people in the US use checks instead of autopay.

It REALLY doesn't explain checks though. Why not just a quick no-fee transfer?

You’re always going to have trouble if you forget about any aspect of your money. I use automatic payments to pay my cell phone bill and yet I have a monthly reminder on my calendar to make sure the payment went through without a problem. Yeah, it’s more work than just forgetting about it but now I know I won’t be buried in fees either for overdraft or for not paying my bill.