[komocode]

> Why on earth would you set up auto-pay?

I've setup auto-pay on several accounts and left it running for over a decade. whatever issue I may have in the future would not exceed the amount of time wasted in manually paying each account.

[nullserver]

A surprise 17,000 electric Bill?

I don’t hear about it much anymore but for years was terrified of making a cell data mistake and ending up with a 40k+ bill.

[ProfessorLayton]

Not sure I understand this, because autopay or not, if you accrue a 17k bill for a service then that's what's due unless you negotiate otherwise, and the lack of autopay is irrelevant.

If you're worried about funds disappearing unexpectedly, many major U.S. banks wave checking account fees with direct deposits setup. It's trivial to setup a bank account with multiple checking/savings accounts, where one account is funded as necessary with expected spending, and have the excess go into the other checking/savings account(s).

That's a best practice anyway, since having a debit card hacked into is a much bigger ordeal than a credit card, so keeping that checking account with minimal funds is optimal.

[manicdee]

> if you accrue a 17k bill for a service then that's what's due

Au contraire: every time I have had a large bill it has been because the biller stuffed up.

Water utility couldn't read the water meter because of the dog so they estimated based on past usage. I don't have a dog. They estimated using someone else's meter. They overcharged me by an order of magnitude.

Electricity utility couldn't read the meter because of the dog, so they too estimated based on past usage. Again, I don't have a dog and they estimated based on the average usage of a house my size (typically a family of 4 to 8). They overcharged me by a factor of three or so.

At one point I changed my mobile phone plan to one that had a special offer going. It took three months for the company to get the amount right, and then it took another three months to get my money back for the first three months they billed incorrectly.

With any system that has variable costs (such as usage fees) I far prefer to receive a bill and pay it by hand because it only takes one error to completely wipe me out financially.

Note about the dog above: at one point the utility company wanted access to my yard to perform some maintenance on the electricity transmission lines (in my town the aerial electrical services are in the back yard to improve the street aesthetic). I asked them to please call me so I can lock up my chickens. The person I talked to didn't have a box to tick for "chickens" so they ticked the box that said "dog". Since then I have not had a meter reader actually read my meters, every bill is "estimated because of dog." I have to take a photo of the meter and send it in to them because they're too lazy to read it themselves.

[jjav]

If some service suddenly tries to charge 17K it's almost certainly an error on their part.

With autopay that error can propagate into draining your account and then all your other autopay accounts that come later get rejected and you'll get penalties and late charges on those.

The first provider, the one who made a mistake, can be talked into correcting it (hopefully anyway). But all the other penalties you'll be responsible for since your account was indeed empty.

So there are real risks to autopay. Maybe not too frequent, but good to be aware.

[ProfessorLayton]

This is a misunderstanding of what I said, I agree that a 17k utility bill is most certainly a mistake.

But for example, if your autopay bills with direct access to your checking account total 2k/mo then it makes sense to limit the funds of that checking account to roughly that much, maybe a bit more incase of variance. If a utility tried to withdraw 17k from an account that only has 2.5k in it, it will not be able to do so (Overdraft "protection" can be turned off).

If there's a small buffer in the checking account, other bills should not cascade from one large anomaly in that case, because the bank won't hand out partial payments.

Yes, there are still risks with autopay, but they're greatly mitigated with a dedicated checking account for that specific purpose. Furthermore, forgetting to pay one of the several bills manually is a risk in and of itself. I'm just pointing out that setting up autopay doesn't necessarily mean giving unlimited access to one's funds.

[nullserver]

Flew to another country once, with a newborn baby. Flight attendant was having some trouble then declared it all good.

What I didn’t realize was she canceling and redoing the tickets over and over again, each charging me for them. A grand each time. So I ended up in a foreign country penniless. Airline company said it was fine since my funds would be returned in a week.

[austhrow743]

Negotiating is a lot easier before you send the money.

[ac29]

I've known people who received huge bills where it was the billing companies fault (such as a bad meter for utility service). On autopay, it would have been a real chore to claw back the amount overpaid.

[nullserver]

Bunch of people in Texas just got surprise massive electric bills.

[MeinBlutIstBlau]

My electric company where I lived a few years ago would take mailed in check or autopay ach only. No cc, no manual payments via ach. They were a little behind...

[nullserver]

Mine is prepaid.

One day I got a text that my balance was low. As I picked up my phone I got another saying balance was 0. While I was opening the app to add funds I got another text saying my service would be turned off if I didn’t pay.

While on the confirm payment screen my power went out.

All happened in about 10 seconds.

[ArchOversight]

None of the electric bills in Texas should have been a surprise. Those people chose to pay market rate for their electricity, that is not always going to turn out well for the consumer during events that would lead to market rate being completely out of wack.

[nullserver]

Victim blaming?

So you think any of the resized how absurdly high market rates can get.