Auto renewal doesn't help here.

Credit cards expire, e-mails get deactivated, addresses change.

If you're not getting notices about your domain expiring in the first place, auto-renew isn't going to stay working after your credit card expires, which is only a couple years.

I use Namecheap, and I have deliberately avoided their auto-renewal service because it doesn't offer me anything.

The key point is that a human needs to be involved in an audit process which occurs regularly. And so I renew all my domains once per year in December, a year in advance.

Now that I think about it, I suppose I could extend one year at a time, but keep a 1-2 year buffer (or larger) in case of dire emergency instead of a 0-1 year buffer.

> I use namecheap and just use their auto renew feature. Do other registrars not have that option?

That still runs into the 10 year problem. Whatever payment information an organization sets up will probably be invalid in 10 years.