[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.