I'm the opposite. I know it's wrong, because I'm giving companies free loans or whatever, but when I pay recurring bills (that aren't on autopay) I just multiply by 10 so I only have to pay once a year or so.

This is wild to see other perspectives. I'm a reasonably upstanding citizen and I have basically two categories of bills:

Bills that are auto-paid.

Bills that are late.

The auto-paid ones are completely on auto-pilot. If I have a particularly heavy spending month (maybe we took a trip somewhere), I might open my bank app to make sure there's enough cash in the account to cover the auto-payment. (Or I might not and either there will be, or auto-overdraft-protection will kick in and I'll end up paying a few bucks in interest.)

>>I'm a reasonably upstanding citizen and I have basically two categories of bills: >>Bills that are auto-paid. >>Bills that are late.

I just mentally went down the list and it hurts me to admit it but that's the exact same for me.

Agree. Autopay is an invisible gremlin reaching in and taking money from me every month. Nickelandimeism is apparently the new economy.

…except autopay isn’t invisible? Also what in the world does paying off a credit card monthly have to do with “nickelandimeism”? How you use the CC is a wholly separate from how you manage its payment.

It’s invisible in the sense that it requires no action on one’s part for funds to be transferred. Which enables (in many ways) nickel and dimeism, as it disconnects the original spending (nickels and dimes, often) from the actual withdrawal of funds from accounts.

You’d just see the overall bill slowly creep up with no clear cause. Frog boiling.

I disagree. Because you're not spending literal cash (it's already disconnecting the spending from the withdrawal of funds), a credit card sits somewhere along that spectrum. Once it's digital bits, the dissociative effect has occurred, credit or debt.

The only "pure" argument here would be to pay with cash, but the logistical cost heavily outweighs the psychological value if you go down that path, in my opinion.

Or it’s a grey area. And at least some direct interaction on relatively short timescales (the same week) without it being easy to ignore (like a repetitive individual alert) is better than none?

I haven't paid bills "manually" in almost 15+ years. You waste so much time opening mail, writing checks, buying stamps, etc. I put everything on auto-pay, with the exception of property taxes (only because the city won't allow it.)

I have more than that I can't autopay but I can go on my bank's site and just have them write a check to recurring payees.

> You waste so much time

It's time well spent — making sure I am paying for the things I really need/want.

I still look at the statements. Writing checks and mailing them out is pure drudgery.

Paying "manually" doesn't mean writing checks and mailing it out. You just log into your bank and click pay instead of have it paid automatically.

It's still "manual" work. Why bother? Set it and forget it.

When they aren’t playing games? Sure.

When everyone under the sun seems to be playing games? It’s a good way to get taken advantage of.

Do you not have the option to receive emails and pay online?

All of my "manual" bills work that way. It takes a few seconds of clicking to schedule the payment on the due date for the full amount, and even log it to my software, which doubles as a chance to check that there wasn't something unexpected going on.

I think being fully aware of every bill or credit card you pay is helpful in being full control of your finances. I get that impression that some people using automatic payments don't slow down to review things carefully. That may not be the case for you, but that doesn't mean others don't make that mistake.

I do! I used to pay by check, then "manual" bill pay for a while, then finally I just did auto payment. I pay off my credit cards in full every month. I have zero debt. Believe me, my finances are more than under control. I could FIRE tomorrow if I wanted to.

I use the same practice. When I tried autopay, years ago, I felt like I never really knew how much money I had; it was like simultaneously balancing a checkbook backwards and forwards in time. Now I do it manually, paying off all current bills every time I get a paycheck, and that is much simpler to understand.

Especially when I was doing a lot of traveling, I pretty much switched everything I could to auto-pay. I always found the weekly or biweekly bill paying something of a drudgery. I still periodically look through stuff but it's pretty rare I find a problem I need to deal with (and that's usually something like a charge from some payment processor I just didn't recognize).

Which it does definitely remove a lot of the work. Which removes a lot of the incentive to pay fewer things (requiring such work), and removes a lot of the visibility towards exactly what is being paid (and trends, etc.).

This is what I do as well, I opened a second checking account so half of my monthly bills is auto deposited from each paycheck and I set all my bills to be at the end of the month so I can make sure everything is smoothly going through. I even have a Google sheet where I keep track of balances weekly and what bills are coming up like the yearly Amazon or something

Counterpoint: autopay gives me peace of mind knowing that I won't miss a payment, which has huge downsides: credit score dings, interest charges, and potentially declined charges.

What I think trips people up is accounting for future expenses. The personal finance tools I've checked out focus on historical transactions but fail to put this to use and forecast future transactions. I set up GNUCash[1] to automatically create all the random monthly bills up to 3 months ahead of time, including a guess at CC totals.

I still check monthly, but its mostly just confirming nobody's stolen my card and updating my investments, which I can't forecast ahead of time =)

[1]: https://www.gnucash.org